Future Holdings Plc has relaunched Keen Systems Ltd, a Reading, Berkshire fault-tolerant file server development company which existed previously under Willaire Electronics, until the group folded in November of last year. The name might seem familiar Keen Systems is one of several companies set up by Dr Tim Keen, who is now a professor of computer sciences at Sheffield Polytechnic. He also acts as technical consultant to Keen Systems, the latest company to take his name, established four years ago to bring fault-tolerant computing to the Novell NetWare environment, taken over by Willaire two and a half years ago. Andrew Bale led the buy-out of Keen from the receivers, with the help of Future Holdings which now owns 51% of the business. Today Keen is a focused company, says Andrew Bale, managing director and one of the two staff making up the firm. Its brief is to develop high-end fault-tolerant Novell Inc NetWare file servers for high-end personal computer networking within large corporate organisations. The manufacture of the systems, which are based on Intel 80486 processors, has been contracted out to Future Holdings’ Future Computers facility in Croydon, Surrey. Future designs the EISA boards, which contain a fairly sound level of fault-tolerance, and Keen has joined with Leatherhead, Surrey-based Baydel Ltd to develop a RAID disk array. Keen is already shipping the fruits of this development, though the company’s Multiserver 2 system won’t be unveiled until the Networks ’92 exhibition on June 23. Keen will sell the systems direct, as well as a range of graphics workstations, fault-tolerant cabling systems, archive systems, communications modules and software tools. The company has no rash plans to expand – it wants to devote itself to developing concepts, while others get on with building the products. According to Bale, in its last year under Willaire, Keen shipped #2m of file servers.
