Aviion

Data General had, for most of its history, essentially mirrored the strategy of DEC with a competitive (but, in the spirit of the time, incompatible) minicomputer with a better price/performance ratio.

With Aviion, DG shifted its sight from a purely proprietary minicomputer line to the burgeoning Unix server market.

The machines ran a System V Unix variant known as DG/UX, largely developed at the company's Research Triangle Park facility.

Because of this, DG gave up working with Motorola, and decided instead to align its efforts with what was soon to become the clear winner in volume microprocessors, and used i386 architecture CPUs from Intel instead.

A system codenamed "Manx" was an earlier NUMA effort based on the original Pentium and Zenith hardware, but it was never brought to market.

It ended up contributing a significant percentage of revenues at the low-end, especially among existing DG customers who had made a decision to switch to NT.

However, at the high-end, although Windows NT could run efficiently on single-block (i.e. quad-processor) building blocks in NUMA servers, it did not at the time have the processor and memory affinity optimizations that are required to achieve high performance on larger systems.

In 1999, EMC purchased Data General for 1.2 billion dollars primarily to gain access to its CLARiiON line of disk array storage products and associated software.