Santa Cruz Operation Inc has got two dozen independent software vendors, OEM customers Compaq Computer Corp, Data General Corp, ICL Plc, NCR Corp, Ing C Olivetti & Co Spa, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG and Unisys Corp – plus Intel Corp – backing its Big E campaign to get enterprise applications up under UnixWare 2.1. Santa Cruz claims Intel’s endorsement is the first time the chip maker has advocated a particular Unix and that it is now providing hardware, marketing and other assistance to the 3DA Unix architecture Santa Cruz and Hewlett-Packard Co are developing for the Merced microprocessor. Santa Cruz says it will license ccNUMA, clustering, large memory (8Gb), large file system (64-bit), symmetric multiprocessing scalability, performance, availability, reliability and failover components from the Unix vendors to create enterprise versions of UnixWare which will be returned as OEM products. It reckons its biggest achievement will be the ability to support rival ccNUMA implementations from the Sequent Computer Systems Inc and Dolphin Interconnect Solutions A/S-Data General industry camps, plus any others that emerge. It says it had 40 engineers from ccNUMA wannabes around a table to thrash out how they will all be supported. As well as supporting Oracle Parallel server, it will take clustering from NCR, Unisys and Pyramid Technology Corp. UnixWare currently scales to 10 CPUs; Santa Cruz will push it to 32- way working using proprietary technology from Chen Systems Inc which on an eight-way system can already offer better than eight times uniprocessor performance. Santa Cruz will do 4Gb file system support. The technologies will be added through this year and next, targeting the merged UnixWare 2.1 (Eiger)/OpenServer Gemini release next year. It may do an interim UnixWare 2.1.x code drop sooner for ccNUMA and 4Gb file support. An enhanced OpenServer release – Comet – is due late this year. A Gemini software development kit compatibility tool kit for Eiger and Comet is due this summer. There is nothing alive as far as UnixWare- on-Sparc goes now that ICL has reverted to its own DRS Unix System V.4 implementation for its Sparc systems. Santa Cruz claims that there is still plenty of discussion on a PowerPC implementation, but no action as yet.
