Banyan Systems Inc has been explaining the strategy behind its recently announced Vines SMP multi-processor network operating system (CI No 1,510) – and it reckons that the era of workgroup computing is over and that its day in corporate computing has finally come. The Marlborough, Massachusetts company says that Vines SMP is designed to take advantage of symmetric multi-processing servers that are scalable and run any task on available processors, rather than asymmetric systems which dedicate each processor to a task. Applications therefore run more quickly on them. Banyan’s European general manager, Rob Baid, reckons and hopes that the consequence of faster servers will be a devolution of mainframe applications to the network, so that people will opt for two fast servers which work out cheaper than one mainframe. This complements corporate-wide networking – peer-to-peer linking of personal computers over a wide geographical area and linking of departments. Banyan has a substantial slice of this small market, whereas in the larger workgroup area its penetration has been tiny. Baid conceded that even if his vision of a huge increase in corporate-wide networking is accurate, users wanting to get the most out of their networks may simply continue to build them up in the piecemeal way they have always done and add singleprocessor servers as and when they need the extra CPU. This would also enable them to stick with tried and tested operating systems. However, he insists that as the dual processor hardware takes off, users will see the sense in having an operating system that fits. Banyan launched SMP as the first operating system to support Compaq’s dualprocessor SystemPro servers and it reckons that other vendors are not far behind.
