NuView Inc, the Houston, Texas-based cluster management company, is gearing up its marketing campaign, having released version 2.0 of its ClusterX product last week. NuView, until recently a pure engineering company, now employs 30 staff and is adding an employee a week, according to new vice president of marketing, Mark Nagaitis, who previously marketed clustering technology for both Compaq Computer Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc.

Nagaitis claims that, although Microsoft Corp hasn’t been evangelizing its Wolfpack Cluster Server technology too much, Intel server vendors such as Compaq, Dell Computer Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co now view high availability clustering as essential if NT is to gain greater marketshare in the enterprise server space. It’s also seen as a way of sustaining their businesses in the face of falling margins on low-end sales. More servers and external storage means more revenue.

And, he says, Microsoft Cluster Server has given NT a new life, reducing the cost of clustering by standardization, so that it is cost effective to add a second server in order to cut down expensive downtime. One-to-one local management is not good enough for these configurations, he says. The NuView product provides both distributed cluster management and dynamic application load balancing, previously barriers to the implementation of MSCS clusters. ClusterX currently has no competitors in the market, according to Nagaitis. The load balancing will become essential when NT clustering expands to four nodes in the Windows 2000 Data Center Edition, next year, and beyond that to eight and 16 nodes.

NuView has OEM deals in place with Dell and Data General Corp, and expects to announce more such deals in the near future, one of them a major European OEM. It has also established its own direct sales force, and will announce its indirect sales strategy at the TechEd 99 conference in Dallas at the end of May.