Santa Cruz Operation Inc will unveil its next-generation Everest operating system as OpenServer 5.0 on May 9, touting the thing as a business-critical environment for one-man-and-his-dog shops to enterprise concerns. The Santa Cruz, California company says OpenServer 5.0 offers new performance, reliability, availability and easy-to-use systems management on top of three file systems. The first is an enhanced version of its System V.3.2 fast file system, with an System V.4 development environment and application programming interfaces. Second is a new desktop file system with journalling and compression for users that need to run the thing in workstation environments (Stacker for Unix, as it puts it). Third is a high throughput file system designed to support database and server systems. Santa Cruz has implemented six management modules, some old, some new and others re-worked, accessed from a single Motif-based administration graphical user interface or a Charm – Character Implementation of Motif – both supporting its Visual TCL scripting language implementation (CI No 2,488). It will re-work the stuff to support whatever specifications X/Open Co Ltd eventually comes up within that area, if it turns out to be out of sync. As well as RAID levels 0, 1 and 5, hot sparing and uninterrupted power supply monitoring, the file systems support new cacheing, disk writing functionality and Terabyte file sizes. It says 5.0 runs typically 30% or more, faster than previous OpenServer releases on the same system. Customers get all three file systems and can chose to use one, two or all three, depending on requirements. Old OpenServer file systems will be hosted, user-level threads is optional, it says and the new release ships with all host-based components of its IXI and VisionWare Windows-to-Unix technologies. It claims to have simplified rather than retreated from multiple client, server and lite OpenServer implementations with a server and a client configuration, plus optimised point-of-sale and secure workstation variations. Pricing is due on May 9, but customers will pay no more than existing tags, the company promises, across user band sizes that will extend both above and below where they are today.
