NCR Corp has unveiled LifeKeeper 2.0, the latest incarnation of its fault-resilient middleware for clustering Unix and Windows NT servers (CI No 2,995). The company claims the latest upgrade is the first software of its kind to enable 16-node clustering for either Unix or Windows NT boxes. The Dayton, Ohio based firm is also touting a new feature dubbed cascading recovery designed to enable applications to withstand multiple failures within a cluster. If one system fails and the application fails-over to another system, which also fails, it moves to the next one where it can be recovered. Meanwhile, a new N-Way Fail-over feature enables servers to be configured to fail-over to any other node within cluster. NCR also claims that its new parallel recovery capability will help boost recovery times by bringing back data in parallel rather than sequentially. The company says it expects most demand to come from the Windows NT market and has also included compatibility with Microsoft’s yet to be released Hydra multi-user NT through a new set of APIs. LifeKeeper 2.0 will be available on MP-RAS (NCR’s implementation of SVR4) and Windows NT from November and will follow up with Sun Solaris support in the second quarter of next year. Pricing for LifeKeeper 2.0 starts at $1,500 per server, ranging up to $20,000 for high end Unix configurations.
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