Santa Cruz Operation Inc continues to take a crisis, what crisis? approach to the ongoing delays to its Gemini release originally scheduled for this summer. The company still says it’s moving ahead with Gemini, confirming that it plans a beta release for the developers forum in August. The company’s executives seem to be towing the party line: There really isn’t a delay on Gemini says Geoff Seabrook vice president for Europe, Middle East, Africa and India but then adds significantly it’ll be in the hands of our OEM partners by the end of the year. Surely that means it’s been delayed? I see what you’re getting at but we reset our timings a year ago, something Seabrook vaguely attributes to the size and complexity of the task describing it as an 18 month project going on 21 months. Seabrook now claims that Gemini will be a platform rather than a mega-release with users able to add modules downloaded from the net. He continues: To give you the party line Gemini isn’t a single product – it’s a technology stream, bewailing the fact that nobody’s ever believed us. Dave Gurr, product marketing manager for SCO Europe says that while Gemini is scheduled for November release, the 64-bit version depends on the availability of a 64-bit processor from Intel Corp. According to the company it’ll be a phased release. From the kernel upwards it’ll be open-server technology, boasting multithreads at kernel level with true synchronous multi processing and support for multiple threads at user level. Other concrete features for the fourth quarter release include a journaling system for online disk and volume management and hotswappable drive support. SCO says it will eventually be offering scalability clustering as well as high availability clustering on Gemini but the company is still evaluating whether to use the Oracle Parallel Server and Distributed lock manager or the Tandem Eclipse and its Loosely Coupled Unix (enabling Unix to be plugged together and viewed as a Single System Image) and Gurr says it may use both. Seabrook is keen to stress that preliminary testing is continuing apace: We’ve got alpha versions with our OEM’s…already NUMA works pretty well on 4-way clustering, we’re working on 16-way clustering though not for the November release…that’ll be next year. So how does it compare to what’s already out there? The alpha release is already up to current Unixware, we’re expecting it to be smoking by November… but we think people will be lining up to try Gemini in November rather than to buy….it could be six months before existing customers move over to it, admits Seabrook..
