ICL Plc has unveiled its server strategy and avowed commitment to only two operating systems, Windows NT and UnixWare. It also reckons it will outperform high-end RISC systems with the launch later this year of its clustered Pentium Pro-based Ji systems. Forging ahead with its Santa Cruz Operation Inc partnership, ICL has pledged allegiance to Santa Cruz’s UnixWare open Unix product, which by 1998 should be a version unified with Hewlett-Packard Co’s HP-UX. ICL believes this will dominate the enterprise systems market of the future. Windows NT, it believes, will continue to grow from the desktop, upwards into large departmental systems, where users will demand the type of availability and fault-tolerance currently required from larger Unix systems. Claiming that mission-critical applications are sneaking almost unnoticed onto Widows NT, ICL has launched a High Availability Manager for NT servers. The High Availability Manager works across two NT server systems, using standard components. The primary application runs on one server, and a secondary, less critical application on a second server. Using the Availability Manager, both systems constantly check each other to monitor the other processor and shared components such as disks and network. If one system detects a major problem with the other, it will attempt to rectify the problem on the fly, and only if it cannot do this, will it automatically fail-over, transferring the applications and data from the faulty server to the good one.
Fail-over
The fail-over takes only a few minutes, and requires no manual intervention. The High Availability Manager makes use of NT’s standard disk mirroring, and runs as a normal application, reading and writing to disk and using memory, in order to find only genuine faults. ICL says that since it uses only standard components, High Availability Manager is cheaper than competitive products. It runs on Fujitsu ICL’s Superserver Ji and Teamserver Ci range and is available now. Entry-level pricing including two systems and NT is around #12,000. On the Unix front, the company is launching clustered superserver Ji systems which will ship at the end of this year. The systems will run UnixWare and Oracle Corp’s Oracle7 Parallel Server. The superserver Ji cluster is based on four Intel Corp Pentium Pro-based superservers, each of which is a four way symmetric multiprocessing system. Oracle7 Parallel Server enables users to run Oracle databases on multiple nodes within a cluster and access a shared data-bases from any node. If one of the nodes becomes unavailable users on the failed node switch to another and continue uninterrupted. The systems will be available with a choice of single, dual and quad processor models. All models in the range also support UnixWare 2, SCO OpenServer release 5, Windows NT Server 3.51. NetWare 4.1 and SMP, and relational databases Oracle, Informix, CA-Ingres, Sybase and SQL Server. ICL says these clustered configurations are expected to outperform high end servers from leading RISC vendors. They are due to ship in fourth quarter. Pricing is not yet available. In 1997 the company will introduce symmetric multiprocessing systems based on Data General Corp’s Scalable Coherent Interface/Non Uniform Memory Access, or NUMA architecture. ICL will license NUMA from Data General, and will collaborate with Santa Cruz and Data Gener-al to bring the first Unix-Ware-based NUMA products to market. The company also plans to offer clustered NUMA systems aimed at the high-end enterprise market.
