Santa Cruz Operation Inc duly unveiled its Everest operating system technologies as OpenServer 5.0 last week and no, you didn’t miss 4.0: it never happened. Santa Cruz says it decided to harmonise its numbering conventions around its new SCO Unix version 5 file systems and has jumped up to OpenServer 5.0 from OpenServer 3.0 and SCO Unix 4.X. With OpenServer 5.0, customers get the various Santa Cruz Unix and server configurations by selecting or deselecting particular components at install time. It will continue to ship OpenServer 3.0 for nine months and will support it for a year after that. Santa Cruz also overhauled its price bands, offering a new lower entry point of five users, with user packs that can be stacked up to get to the required level. It claims customers will not be paying any more for their OpenServer 5.0 software than they did for previous releases. To encourage CD-ROM distribution, it is making tape and disk packaging more expensive. The Enterprise System is targeted at departments, small to medium-sized businesses and replicated organisations such as hotels and food franchises. It integrates personal computer local networks and legacy systems, is fitted with all graphics, networking and file system options and costs $1,300 for up to five users. The Host System – without networking and designed to support character terminals and point-of-sale configurations – is priced at $700 for up to five users. Santa Cruz has six further pricing bands for adding more users to both environments. Adding up to 10 users costs another $500, up to 25 more users is $1,000, up to 100 other users costs $3,000, up to 500 more users will cost $7,000, 1,000 users $10,000 and 5,000 users $25,000. To get to a 128-user licence, a customer would start with a basic five-use r system and add the 25-user and 100-user options. The single user desktop system is $800. On top, the OpenServer Development System is $800; Virtual Disk Manager, providing Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks level 0, 1 and 5 is $1,000; symmetric multiprocessing licences are $1,000 per processor; and SCO (Locus) Merge and Wabi are $400 each for desktops, $1,000 (รบ865) on servers. The development system includes a compiler switch for creating OpenServer or System V.4 code. Other layered products priced separately include Microsoft LAN Manager for SCO, Visionware PC-Connect, XVision and SQL Retriever (Windows services). Distributed services are Security, X500, Administration, Cell Directory and DCE Executive. There is also a Distributed Computing Environment development kit, OpenServer configuration tool kit and an advanced hardware developer kit. More than a third of Santa Cruz Operation’s business now comes from replicated site installations. Symmetric multiprocessing configurations account for around 5% of business, it hopes to double that share by this time next year. The company claims to have shipped 170,000 servers last year, and it is looking to top 200,000 this year.
