Industrial personal computer manufacturer Texas Micro Inc has launched a licensing program for fallover technology that it claims will reduce the cost of implementing fault tolerance by up to 90%. Texas Micro, from Houston, Texas will embed the technology within its own hardware systems and is also targeting it at other computer manufacturers in mainstream commercial markets. Hewlett-Packard Co has already licensed the technology in a non-exclusive deal and will incorporate it into its HP9000 Enterprise Server product family, as well as other products in the future. Specific financial details have not been released, but Texas Micro has described it as multi-million. Texas Micro was founded in 1975, and merged with Sequoia Systems Inc in March 1995 and changed its name. In the autumn last year the company sold off the Sequoia mainframe business, and changed its name back to Texas Micro, leaving it with the core technology that has enabled to develop its latest offering. The failover technology has already been applied to mainframe systems, but Texas Micro has reduced the cost of implementing it for NT systems by using off-the-shelf hardware and software, connected to the servers via PCI card. Any link of high enough speed can be used to connect the systems together. The system executes directed check pointing ensuring that if a problem occurs on the system, all information will be duplicated to the second system in what the company is describing as near real-time. Although the technology is available for licensing, Texas Micro has not yet installed it into its own computers aimed at customers in the telecommunications, industrial automation and mobile computing sectors. Texas Micro Inc reported third quarter net losses of $445,000 down from $5.5m on revenue down 37.8% at $14.7m (CI No 3,160), and the company hopes this latest development will put it back on track towards profitability. Since its break off from Sequoia, staff numbers have risen from 200 to around 320. On the storage front, Compaq says until quite recently it was not even on the storage radar but now claims to be second only to IBM Corp in local network storage market, with 40% of LAN storage. It sees a real opportunity in enterprise storage, and has launched its fibre channel-connected storage family, currently testing in more than 250 customer sites worldwide, which it says will be available in the first quarter of next year. It is also announcing a Wide-Ultra SCSI-3 10,000 RPM hard drive and the Model 35/70 DLT Digital Linear Tape Library, which claims to backup more than a terabyte of data in less than 10 hours. Combined with Computer Associates Inc Cheyenne ARCserve 6.5 software for Windows NT, up to 5 libraries can be combined in a ‘virtual’ library. Compaq says it will introduce a large number of new storage products over the next few months. Finally, Compaq is introducing what it claims is a clustering option that is low cost, easy to deploy and simple to set up. The ProLiant Cluster Series F will use fibre channel storage interconnects, and the ProLiant Cluster Series S, SCSI-based clustering, both of which will support Microsoft Cluster Server – the former Wolfpack. In addition, Compaq will offer NT clusters supporting Oracle Parallel Server and the Non-Stop SQL/MX database from its recent Tandem Computers Inc acquisition. Compaq currently offers only two-node clusters, but expects to offer 4 node clusters late next year, when the next release of Microsoft’s cluster software is available.
