Considering the importance of clustering to the Windows NT market and the number of players jumping aboard one-upsmanship will doubtless become a vendor byword in the months to come. Yesterday NCR Corp made its pitch, offering the first three-way clustering for NT, developed for its Intel Corp Pentium Pro-based Worldmark servers. It’s going to peddle the combination as an economy that eliminates the need for multiple pairs of servers backing each other up, saving server costs. It did it by enhancing LifeKeeper, its high-availability middleware. LifeKeeper requires no changes to the operating system to work but LifeKeeper itself has to be made to support the underlying software by means of recovery kits. NCR has announced six recovery kits; for Informix On-Line Dynamic Server, Oracle7, Sybase 11, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and SAP R/3 where previously it just handled TCP/IP, LAN Manager and SQL Server. NCR’s choice of applications to support shows where it’s heading. Our sister publication ClieNT Server News hears IDC is about to release new NT market share numbers that reportedly put NCR at the top of the heap – number one in servers costing $50,000 and above. This price point, NCR is quick to note, is only for the naked hardware. It is not the whole cost of the system – so add another 50%-100% – which explains why NCR is interested. Product marketing VP Mike Denny claims NCR will dominate the market for four-way servers and above despite the onslaught of competition expected from the likes of HP and Compaq. All tolled, NCR has an installed base of 15,000+ NT servers in the field.
