A handful of large open systems users that banded together last year to form Moses – it stands for Massive Open Systems Environment Standards seek a way out of the open systems wilderness – have now published a set of preferred open systems specifications for massively parallel hardware and software vendors. Group members include British Telecommunications Plc’s British Telecom International, Burlington Coat Factory, Millipore Corp, US West NewVector Group, Oracle Corp and Sequent Computer Systems Corp. The first four specifications concentrate on event monitoring; back-up and recovery, which includes increased back-up parallelisation and improved archiving capabilities for databases of 20Gb plus; task management and change management. The first of many specifications, the group plans to roll out more than 30 specifications over the next two years covering areas such as massively parallel databases, systems evaluation, security, disaster recovery, report viewing and data sharing and delivery. In anticipation of Moses’s demands, some vendors, including Computer Associates International Inc and systems management start-up OpenVision Technologies Inc, have already begun talking to the Moses team about product compliance. Oracle and Sequent (also Moses members), have already endorsed the group’s specifications and say that they will make current and future products Moses-compliant.
