One hand giveth and the other taketh away. Compaq, Data General, ICL, Intel and Unisys are bankrolling future development of Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s UnixWare for the enterprise with undisclosed financial and technology resources but will claw back a percentage via a royalty stream based on the volume of future SCO shipments. It’s an important measure of support for SCO, which is trying to beef up its enterprise credentials and shore up its leading share of the Unix-on-Intel market ahead of Merced, when a bevy of Unix alternatives, including those from Sun and DEC/Sequent, will be on offer to Merced users. Although no financial details were made public the investments are worth millions, according to SCO. Also a couple of Unix team issues have been made clear. Data General says 64-bit UnixWare is it’s strategic platform goal for Merced, not DG-UX, although it also previously committed to making DG-UX available on Merced. Compaq and SCO confirmed there are discussions underway about bringing Digital Unix and UnixWare closer together (CI No 3,338). SCO optimistically describes itself as the standard Unix on Intel for the data center, a characterization Intel says is entirely SCO’s designation and nothing to do with it. What else did we learn? UnixWare is currently only good for 10-way scaling now; it will take another two years (at least that’s the goal) to get to full 32-way support and 32-node ccNUMA support with 95% linear scaling as processors are added. At around 10,000 tpc transactions per minute now, SCO’s aim is to improve on that by tenfold. SCO says average uptime is around 125 days before failure; it’s aiming for 20,000 hours – 833 days. It will ship 64-bit UnixWare when Intel ships Merced. On March 10 SCO hosts its Big E II coming out party for UnixWare 7.0. The market remained unimpressed with SCO’s news, sending its shares down $0.0625 to $4.625.
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