After a long running lawsuit with Timpanogas over clustering software, Novell Inc has decided that it will back down from an all out approach on the clustering market through its Orion clustering technology. The company has already agreed to resell Vinca Corp’s StandbyServer software for use with NetWare and IntraNetware (CI No 3,330). But the company will launch Orion on October 30. Novell senior vice president of the products group Stewart Nelson, said that Novell had decided to concentrate instead on Symmetrical Multi Processing capabilities for NetWare rather than high end clustering features. He claims that Merced was due to have improved fault tolerant capabilities, and that the database vendors had begun to put fail over recovery capabilities into their software. He says that the company didn’t want to end up developing a product that was out of date in 18 months. This suggests that either Novell is reluctant to invest in a product that can’t deliver the technology at a cost that will pay for the product development, or it can’t see a large enough market for the technology. Another evaluation is that with the release of Novell’s native NDS for NT software in October, the company is moving towards a position where its own network operating system NetWare becomes less essential for the company, and will develop products designed around its directory services, which it has been pushing heavily. Nelson denies that native NDS for NT could cannibalize NetWare 5.0 sales, instead saying that it will give them an entry into purely NT-based customer accounts.
