Univel, the desktop Unix joint venture between Unix System Laboratories Inc and Novell Inc, was officially launched last Thursday, promising to make a server dent in the Intel iAPX-86 market and then pursue other systems with its Destiny product. Sources close to the start-up claim that a Sparc implementation of Destiny is definitely in the cards for the end of next year and Univel’s new president Joel Applebaum last week also mentioned Advanced RISC Computing and others. However the start-up will not have anything marketable until the middle of next year. Until then, all it will say is that the software will be targeted at both the client and the server and work with native NetWare – adding buzzwords like ideal applications and database engine, workgroup-oriented, keyed to multimedia, heavy on interoperability, shared resources, messaging. Rather unsurprisingly, because of its distribution skills, Novell turns out to be the lead partner with a 55% interest and the start-up starts life endowed with a kitty worth $30m in cash and other assets. Unix Labs chairman Bob Kavner made it quite clear Univel specifically meant to outflank Microsoft’s would-be Unix competitor NT and the IBM-Apple joint venture warning them this is our turf. Applebaum forecast that more than half of the advanced operating systems market could fall to Univel and spoke of moving billions of units. He expects Univel to be in the black quickly. Unix Labs officials, however, made light of suggestions that the mere existence of Univel could create a rift between it and its other partner Sun Microsystems Inc, which is targeting the self-same Intel market with Solaris 2.0 and is also a significant developer of System V.4. Unix Labs president Roel Pieper said he had spoken to Sun as recently as the night before the conference and that it was amenable to what was happening. He suggested that they would both be carrying the Unix flag into the market.
Jump start
As to the joint venture, specific financial terms were not disclosed. However, it holds technology rights from both Novell and Unix Labs. In addition, it will have access to certain of their technical resources and educational, training, sales, marketing and distribution. Novell has already signed to market and distribute Univel’s forthcoming line to its 3,080 resellers, giving it a jump start on sales. The venture is headquartered in San Jose, California. An integration unit is already in place in Utah, Novell’s stomping ground, under one of Novell’s Unix gurus Grover Richter, now Univel product group vice-president. A small development-minded liaison group will be headquartered at Unix Labs to huddle with Unix Labs’s Desktop Technology Laboratory, creators of Destiny, the miniaturised System V.4.1 Univel will be licensing. Unix Labs will hand off Destiny to Richter to be tightly integrated with NetWare and turned into a product – work that has been on-going for several quarters, Applebaum indicated, with Unix Labs and Novell staff acting as an ad hoc virtual company. The companies claimed the effort was well along as well it should be after absorbing two years of work. Key features, however, such as the interface, seem to still be unresolved, with the start-up considering buying in some outside technologies – not all of them intended for Univel’s initial offering – the next one is already in the labs, Richter said. The start-up expects to employ 50 next year. Its distribution efforts are expected to be worldwide (System V.4.1 is internationalised) and immediate, operating initially out of parent facilities. Univel is to pursue distributors, integrators and resellers of every complexion for the binary version of Destiny and build on Unix Labs’ OEM alliances for source licensees. The Univel board includes Applebaum, two nominees from Novell and two from Unix Labs. One of these slots has gone to Novell executive vice-president Kenwal Rikhi. – Maureen O’Gara
Novell also pushed fault-tolerance to the centre of its stage a week earlier with the announcement that Stratus Computer Inc will be
producing a fault-tolerant implementation of NetWare to be ready next year, starting with NetWare for Unix code and adapting it for both its proprietary VOS and fault-tolerant Unix V.4, FTX. Stratus also says it will add NetWare protocols to its Network Express communications software, providing NetWare with a gateway to the 25 or more protocols the product supports. Novell has been muttering about fault-tolerant NetWare for years – there was the grand plan, unveiled in 1987, for three levels of system fault-tolerance – SFT levels I and II offered, respectively, on the fly fixing of bad disk blocks and fully-mirrored disks, but level III – fully-duplicated and mirrored file servers – never appeared. Despite saying it was working with Compaq Computer Corp to develop a system based around two servers linked by FDDI, and even the occasional prototype appearing, the work always hit a glitch. Then, last year, all NetWare 80286 variants were wrapped up into NetWare 2.2, the SFT name disappeared and it looked as if mirrored servers were quietly being forgotten. But no. SFT Level III work is still active and it is in beta test in a number of US sites according to Graeme Allan, Novell’s UK technical marketing manager. While Allan was circumspect about the details, he said that the Compaq-FDDI scheme is still the approach and that a working version of the system had been displayed at Novell’s Geneva developers’ conference in May. Still, no formal launch date though. If, then, Novell gets SFT III off the ground next year and Stratus delivers on its promises, the network manufacturer will have two fault-tolerant offerings, with the potential to work as a single product line, but also to compete with each other. Ask Stratus who it sees as a typical customer for its implementation and it will give you the phone number of Jeremy Rees at IBJ International. Rees, a director of the London-based off-shoot of Industrial bank of Japan is a prime candidate: the company’s back room systems run exclusively on Stratus machines, while the front-room staff use Lotus Development Corp systems with the data sitting on NetWare servers. He uses the Unix file transfer protocol to swap data between the two, a procedure that cannot, with all the best will in the world, be called fault-tolerant. Rees’ major requirement, then, is to turn his existing Stratus kit into a NetWare file server; he has little time for the notion of SFT III, noting that fault-tolerant in the world of minis and micros rarely means the same thing. But if the users are mainly interested in the Stratus version of NetWare as a simple file server, the company has made it clear that its plans extend a good deal further, in a addition to the full set of print services and so on, Stratus says it will attempt to produce application programming interfaces for both environments that will enable proper client-server interworking between NetWare clients and Stratus hosts. VOS applications are largely client-server in nature anyway and so Stratus will attempt to arrange things so that the existing client software can be transported to the NetWare clients. Stratus’s other big hope is to make use of Novell’s not-inconsiderable expertise with the commodity market in order to push its fault-tolerant technology closer to the desktop.
Token Ring
Stratus also talked about the two joining to explore the required technologies for creating fault-tolerant computers, fault-tolerant servers, general-purpose minis and mainframes. What this may mean, according to David Burns – workstation integration manager, is that the partners will take the technology and know-how that Stratus has invested in its proprietary Stratalink fault-tolerant dual Token Ring and try to devise a standard way of implementing fault-tolerant networks that will be acceptable to the industry as a whole. Stressing that the idea was pretty speculative, and was his opinion rather than company policy, Burns explained that one of the major requirements for a fault-tolerant network is that all of the participating machines have a standard p
iece of software to act as a heart-beat. With Novell as thick as thieves with most of the Unix community at the moment, and seen as a neutral participant by hardware manufacturers generally, a proposal for a fault-tolerant local area network standard from the two would obviously be worth a look. The first step, however, will be to make the technology work for linking Stratus and native NetWare machines together according to Burns. Which only leaves the question, whatever happened to Stratus’ commitment to the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing Environment, which includes the Unix implementation of Microsoft Corp’s LAN manager, LM/X? Stratus will be implementing the fundamental DCE services, says Burn, but, as for LM/X, we are not doing it because there is no market pressure. – Chris Rose
