Stratus Computer Inc is working on a pair of software add-ons to its NT Radio Clusters that will support Microsoft Corp’s Internet Information Server and SQL Server, reports ClieNT Server News. It figures that the products will be good for an assault on the emerging electronic commerce market. In electronic commerce a Web server crash is equivalent to the store burning down, a database server crash the same as losing one’s entire order backlog. Big electronic commerce sites, Stratus believes, will pay a premium to see that neither occurs. High Availability for Internet Information Server, built on top of the standard Isis Availability Manager that controls Radio clusters, automatically recovers lost Internet, File Transfer Protocol and Gopher services. Due for release in the first quarter of 1997, the product will be priced at $500 per Radio Cluster Compute node as an add-on with no client fee, or will be included in a hardware- software package that starts at $67,000. Radio Cluster Continuous Availability Server for SQL, also due in the first quarter, will enable multiple replicas of an SQL Server database application to run in parallel on multiple servers in a Radio cluster, but to the users it will look like a single database service. It will cost $1,200 per Radio Cluster Compute node plus $100 per client, with bundled systems starting at around $68,400. Meanwhile, at Comdex last week, Stratus showed off its prospective Pentium Pro 200 Radio Clusters, which are intended to be available in the first quarter. It said its architecture can support mixed Pentium and Pentium Pro Compute Nodes. It doesn’t have a price for a standard six-node Pentium Pro cluster ready yet, but said that the starting price for each cluster, which has two two-way symmetric multiprocessing Compute Nodes, two Storage Nodes with 2Gb of disk in each and two Network Nodes, will be $70,000. The six-node cluster will be able to expand to handle up to two additional Computer and Storage Nodes within its chassis.
