Starlight Networks Inc, the company with the NetWare-derived operating environment designed to turn standard iAPX-86, and latterly Solaris, servers into video servers, has now done a version of the StarWorks system for IBM Corp’s RS/6000 – and IBM is to license it, a move that suggests that IBM still hasn’t resolved the muddle at the heart of its business that constantly sees it offering competing products for a single market. For better or worse, the MVS mainframe had been singled out as IBM’s preferred video-on-demand server, and since margins on the mainframe are still much better than on the RS/6000, it will find itself bidding the mainframe first and losing the business altogether where it could have won it if it had bid RS/6000 from the start. Under the new deal, Starlight Networks has signed a worldwide development agreement for the StarWorks multimedia networking software supporting the AIX 4.X operating system on RS/6000, and has licensed StarWorks for AIX to IBM. Uniprocessor versions at 25Mbps and 50Mbps will be available from Starlight Networks from next quarter; StarWorks-25M for AIX will support up to 25Mbps of streaming data, or up to 20 simultaneous users at 1.2Mbps for MPEG video files; StarWorks-50M supports up to 50Mbps, or 40 MPEG users at 1.2Mbps. Support for a greater number of users will follow with support for multiprocessor RS/6000s. StarWorks-25M for AIX will be $15,000 for server software, client support, and support for live video one-way multicasting with the StarWorks-TV feature; StarWorks-50M will be $25,000. It will support MS-DOS, Windows, Macintosh and Unix clients over 10BaseT Ethernet and Token Ring, with support for FDDI planned.
