Amdahl Corp, one of the few OEM customers for NCR Corp’s LifeKeeper clustering software, says it too is about to release version 2.0 of the product, which expands the clustering capabilities up to 16 nodes. Amdahl goes to Entersoft Systems Corp, which released the 16 node version of the product earlier this week (CI No 3,443), and is the official OEM channel for the product. Amdahl says it’s happy to have Entersoft as a buffer between itself and NCR, one of its competitors, but doubts that such a small concern could take on full responsibility and product development for the software. Although NCR’s attention appears to be elswhere, Amdahl believes that there is at least a two year horizon for the further development of Lifekeeper, which it says customers prefer over Microsoft Corp’s Wolfpack due to its robustness. Amdahl only has rights to sell the NT version of Lifekeeper. It says that in conjunction with its FCAL fibre channel software it has customers running linked clusters of servers set up in failover mode in separate buildings.
