Introducing the company’s hot new line of R-series RISC-based Guardian and NonStop-UX Unix systems (CI No 1,790), John Kane, Tandem Computers Inc’s vice-president of marketing strategy, acknowledges that the new Unix systems do not provide the same degree of fault-tolerance as the Guardian systems, but he says that new software capabilities take panics to a subroutine which then analyses and corrects the fault to prevent those disorderly shut-downs associated with Unix. The ultimate objective is Guardian-like fault tolerance in Unix, but Kane claims that multiprocessing Unix is a prerequisite, and says the capability has yet to emerge – although Sequoia Systems Inc might disgree. As regards the new RISC-based Guardian systems, Tandem is keen to stress total compatibility with existing systems and says that it changed less than 1% of Guardian code to enable the RISC interfaces. John Kane sees no reason why the very top end machines won’t be using RISC processors within two years.
