Compaq Computer Corp says it’s committed to move the NonStop clustering technology it acquired from Tandem Computers Inc out onto the mass market, and yesterday finally sealed its agreement with the Santa Cruz Operation Inc over the UnixWare version of the product. SCO says it plans to offer the technology to its other OEMs in the future. Compaq’s Tandem division has actually been shipping NonStop Clusters for UnixWare on ProLiant Integrity XC systems to telecommunications companies since the beginning of the year, and will continue with direct sales. But now SCO has the rights to sublicense the software under the name UnixWare NonStop Clusters. It will now begin an early access program, shipping the software as a bundled package, initially with UnixWare 2.1.2, for the rest of the year. Tandem’s software, says SCO, gives it a two-year lead over its competitors. Offering scalability as well as availability, NonStop Clusters uses Tandem’s single system image software – the only such technology currently available for Intel platforms – and scales up to six nodes, though systems of up to 30 nodes have been tested. SCO and Compaq intend to jointly establish a third party sales channel for clustered systems, which have traditionally been sold direct, and are beginning evaluation programs that include a free demo version, a series of development and competency centers worldwide, and an enterprise services and support operation. Database companies such as Computer Associates International Inc, IBM Corp’s Software Group and Informix Corp came out in support of the initiative. And ICL’s European High Performance Systems Group, along with its worldwide parent Fujitsu/ICL, said they were evaluating the product with a view to introducing the full version once it is generally available next year. Systems sold jointly with Compaq will continue to use Tandem’s ServerNet as the high-speed link between cluster nodes, providing throughput of 50MB/sec, aggregated to 300Mb/sec over six nodes. But SCO wants to use standard hardware, and hopes to introduce a virtual interface architecture implementation of the product without ServerNet in the future. It says it has already demonstrated the product using Ethernet. Compaq says it doesn’t intend to port the software over to other Unixes or to NT, although some aspects have already found their way into Microsoft Corp’s Wolfpack Microsoft Cluster Server, through the joint Microsoft/Tandem agreement that’s still in place. WolfPack is limited to two node failover operation. One thing that might hold up mass market acceptance is a lack of any standard clustering APIs for software developers. NonStop has its own set of service management- oriented APIs, to which Compaq is adding some data center APIs from Digital Equipment Corp’s TrueCluster system. SCO and Compaq say they will monitor standards efforts, and expose a set of cluster-aware application APIs once they are settled. The UnixWare 7 version is being demonstrated, and is expected to become generally available in the first half of next year.
