Under increasing fire from its competitors, cluster interconnect specialist Dolphin Interconnect Solutions Inc has formed its own CluStar Forum of supporting vendors, and rallied Data General Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp, Lockheed Martin, Novell Inc, Ing C Olivetti SpA, Scali Computer, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG and Sun Microsystems Inc to support its cause. Dell Computer Corp, although not in the official list of members, is said to be actively participating in the Forum and evaluating the technology. The new organization, announced at NetWorld+Interop yesterday, says its aim is to increase industry awarenness in the Dolphin product and other IEEE-1596-compliant Scalable Coherent Interface products. Both Tandem Computers Inc and GigaNet Inc have been pushing for support for alternative interconnect technology recently, partly driven by Intel Corp and Compaq Computer Corp’s definition of the Virtual Interface Architecture specification last year. VI was defined to facilitate clustering applications development and performance (CI No 3,141). Dolphin says that the formation of the new group will help build momentum towards the availability of middleware, OEMs, system integrators and third party products for its technology, needed before it gains a wider acceptance in the marketplace. It will refer to its SCI product line as ClusStar from now on. Sun, Data General and Olivetti are long-term users of Dolphin adapter cards and switches, and Siemens Nixdorf is now using CluStar for its RM6000 Unix servers.
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