Milpitas, California-based NetFrame Systems Inc says its Live-Drive non-stop drive subsystem for its iAPX-86 family-based servers enables customers physically to replace, add and remove industry-standard disk drives without interruption to the network server’s operation. The company claims that users of Live-Drive can virtually eliminate network server downtime due to disk drive maintenance and repair. The Live-Drives will ship this month in 1.6Gb capacity initially, for $8,000. NetFrame plans to offer Live-Drive in 380Mb and 760Mb capacities in addition to Live-Drive tape modules before the end of the year. And the company has brought out NetFrame MultiNet – local network software supporting multiple redundant connections between a network server and standard Ethernet and Token-Ring local nets. MultiNet is claimed to enable network traffic to be distributed dynamically across up to eight concurrent networks, achieving up to eight times the performance of conventional server designs. The MultiNet software is designed to facilitate redundant network configurations and connections so that single points of failure can be minimised or eliminated. Rather than restricting all traffic to a single local network connection, the company explains, MultiNet in an OS/2 environment enables the NetFrame to be connected to multiple segments of the same logical network to provide direct access to the serv er. NetFrame offers some 254 sessions on a single network. NetFrame MultiNet will ship this month for OS/2 and is being certified for Microsoft Corp LAN Manager and IBM Corp LAN Server network operating systems as we write. The software for NetFrame entry-level models, the NF100ES and NF200, will support up to three local net connections for $4,000. For the NF300 and NF400 models, which support up to eight local network connections, MultiNet for OS/2 will be $8,000. A MultiNet capability for NetWare will ship first half 1992.
