It appears that Hewlett-Packard Co is making amorous advances towards Redmond and is planning to shift a significant proportion of its Unix business over to Windows NT. HP has signed to be Microsoft’s lead development partner on its Wolfpack clustering technology. The pair have never been that close, which makes the new relationship all the more surprising. HP had been working on an alternative clustering effort with Compaq Computer Corp, Tandem Computer Inc, Intel Corp and Novell Inc using Dolphin Interconnect Solutions AS’ Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) and Tandem’s Servernet technology. It’s understood that HP has looked carefully at the SCI work and decided to plump for the Redmonder instead. HP’s clustering roadmap includes an NT port of its MC/ServiceGuard high-availability software that is currently offered under HP-UX on the HP9000 to run on HP NetServer application servers running NT. It also includes Oracle Corp’s Parallel Server, which is already in the process of moving to NT. HP and Oracle have been working for three years on clustering stuff for HP-UX. Hewlett’s HP-UX PA-RISC servers would be in danger from the super server clustering work with Microsoft if it turns out as planned.
