Computer Associates International has chosen Tandem Computers Inc as its first CA-Unicenter development partner and the two are building clustering software for use with CA’s management suite that will eventually allow organizations to cluster up to 100 Windows NT or Unix nodes. Announced yesterday at CA World in New Orleans, CA firm says by year-end it expects to have a clustering option available for all Tandem platforms, half a dozen Unix flavors and Windows NT. The NT work is to be based on the WolfPack APIs Tandem has created in conjunction with Microsoft Corp and other firms (CI No 2,908). CA says the Unix work was developed entirely by itself and Tandem. The first phase will deliver CA-Unicenter additions in the areas of recovery and restart with support for about 50 clustered nodes. A second development phase will provide a single system image based on CA/Tandem technology unrelated to WolfPack, the company says. CA says the two firms will spend $20m to develop software that provides high availability and fault tolerance. Although the unnamed clustering software looks set to go up against IBM Corp’s planned Phoenix solution – see other top story today – CA says it has no plan to offer the software for use with mainframes or DEC VAXes. Meantime, CA’s TNG CA-Unicenter release with the 3D interface due out at the end of the year will be welded together with certain Tandem technologies, including the NonStop transaction manager’s system object monitor, virtual home subsystem and network static extended technologies. Tandem CEO Roel Pieper said new databases will be required to take advantage of clustering over distributed systems and expects some of the Tandem technology to also be used in versions of CA’s Ingres relational database which will provide a repository for the new CA-Unicenter releases and clustering additions. The agreement will also see Tandem bundle CA-Unicenter TNG with everything it sells.
