Pleasanton, California-based OpenVision Inc, fighting back from rumours of its imminent demise, has kicked in with OpenVNetBackup for Digital Unix. It is intended to increase data integrity through automatic back-up, archive and restore services for files, directories, raw partitions and large Oracle databases. Controlled release copies of OpenVNetBackup will be available beginning next month and Digital Equipment Corp has announced that it will ship AlphaServers bundled with the software. OpenVNetBackup extends automated storage management services from disk to robotic peripherals and remote disk systems. Using Polycenter NetView, OpenVNetBackup can be managed from a single console. two streams: core services and add-on technologies, which could come in at higher or lower levels. Core distributed services, security, naming and file system will be developed as one technology block. Stuff that is not dependent, but can be deployed for use with Distributed Computing Environment core services, will be the subject of a clutch of parallel development initiatives, if the Software Foundation can attract Pre-Structured Technology funding from vendors.
Discussions with Sun
One of these will be the promised effort to develop Federated Naming and interoperability between Distributed Computing Environment’s naming service and Sun’s X/Open Co Ltd-backed Network Information Services system, a project now stripped from the core development effort. The Software Foundation says it has had discussions with Sun on the subject, has a preliminary design on the board, but has not architected the thing yet. Another Pre-Structured Technology process – or maybe the same one depending on how it is played – will develop Banyan Systems Inc’s StreetTalk directory as a desktop naming service for Distributed Computing Environment. It’s pretty much a necessity given the Software Foundation’s plan to accommodate NetWare integration. Federated Naming will enable users to get into Distributed Computing Environment through a bunch of mechanisms, including StreetTalk, an X.500 version of which Banyan promises next year. Details of other Pre-Structured Technology processes, for Distributed Computing Environment or otherwise, are expected after the Foundation members meeting in June. The Foundation says it already has seven or eight proposals for additional Distributed Computing Environment technologies under review, including instrumentation, performance enhancements and objects. Separately, the Foundation says it has already got engineering resources devoted to enhancing security for the Distributed Environment’s Mosaic-based World Wide Web technologies. Moreover, it is investigating why the Environment’s vaunted security mechanism, Kerberos, has found so little use around the Internet, and what it can do to propel the thing into use there. The security stuff is seen as a medium-term project. More nebulous issues include technologies to address Distributed Computing Environment-to-CORBA 2 interoperability – which depend upon the outcome of the latest jockeying for positions in the object world – and how messaging for the asynchronous world can be addressed by the Environment. The Software Foundation’s Architecture Planning Council is investigating these longer-term issues and how they, and other technologies, can be provided as specific services to Unix and non-Unix end-users, rather than as new architectural frameworks. The Software Foundation claims that the US Army has now standardised on Distributed Computing Environment for all of its client-server applications and that Schlumberger Ltd is rolling out the Environment on between 1,000 and 2,000 servers and 20,000 clients. Alongside DCE 1.2, the Common Desktop Environment and Motif integration and development effort is the Software Foundation’s other near-term project. A joint development agreement for that work has not yet been signed. The status of the OSF/1 operating system and associated microkernel and embedded development efforts are the subject of a separate the Software Founda
tion round table being held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this week.
