Early last week Citrix Systems Inc quietly moved its Heidelberg load balancing technology out into its first real beta version, hears ClieNT Server News. Heidelberg lets the company’s WinFrame 2.0 distributed Windows software treat any number of Windows NT- based servers as a single machine, creating server farms and providing administrators with the management tools to run the increased number of users Heidelberg implies, as well as to route applications to servers with the best performance. It should not however increase the number of users WinFrame supports per server which is reckoned to be 15 per Pentium. The actual number of users supported is dependent on the power of the underlying hardware and the complexity of the application being run. A second beta is anticipated for the end of February with delivery following in the second quarter. Heidelberg was originally set to appear for Windows NT 3.51 but a shift to NT 4.0, Citrix’s first experience with that version, pushed its debut back. Citrix expects to inherit NT’s clustering capabilities from Microsoft’s Wolfpack and should benefit from the use of Tandem Computers Inc’s ServerNet failover technology.
