By William Fellows
It may appear to have been left behind in the Unix uptime stakes by the rivalry between Sun Microsystems Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co over how long their systems can stay up without failure, but Santa Cruz Operation Inc says the spat primarily highlights the lack of any common way of assessing system availability. It agrees with The Uptime Institute’s view that the battle for five nines overlooks the key reasons for downtime; people and processes. However, SCO says that when the finger is pointed at the system and services downtime it is usually the software which is made out to be the culprit. In addition to whatever efforts The Uptime Institute and its supporters may bring to bear on the problem as a whole, it thinks empirical research on comparative uptime in different workload situations should also be available. That’s why it expects in the next quarter or two to ramp up its own uptime campaign for UnixWare. It claims it’s got the rest of the Unix crowd licked when it comes to HA and will prove it. How? It says it has been working with its data center buddies Compaq, ICL, Unisys and Data General on getting all of their HA workloads supported. It’s also been working with Intel on an uptime project Intel will use to demonstrate a little uptime showmanship. Intel’s also working with an unnamed group to create some HA industry standards.
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