Tandem Computers Inc has large ambitions where Windows NT is concerned, and yesterday revealed plans for extending its high- end Himalaya NonStop clustering technology and availability software down to NT platforms. Tandem is aiming for volume business and commodity markets, though it’s at pains to stress that it’s not giving up on its pure Himalaya range either. It’s all part of Tandem chief executive Roel Pieper’s plan for creating a ‘new Tandem.’ The company announced the NonStop DOM distributed object manager for NT and NonStop Tuxedo transaction processing, NonStop Java Server and the NonStop SQL/MX massively extensible database which run on NT or Tandem’s own Himalaya parallel processors. The company says it expects its customers to be able to extend its Himalaya installations with cheaper, commodity hardware running Windows NT for less mission critical applications. Tandem demonstrated what it called the world’s largest NT server, a cluster of 16 four-processor Tandem S1000s, linked via the company’s high-speed ServerNet interconnect technology at the San Francisco press event. The system was configured with 8Gb of main memory and 2Tb disk running Tandem’s NonStop SQL/MX, or Massively Extensible, database. It includes an Object Relational Mining facility supporting data mining tasks without having to extract data first, plus Informix Software Inc and third party DataBlade modules given its use of extended data type technology from Illustra Technologies which Informix acquired and productized in its Universal Server database. Pieper says Tandem will support Microsoft’s forthcoming WolfPack clustering software where it is installed, but that Tandem’s own clustering software will continue to cater for higher end requirements. In addition Tandem says it will help Microsoft improve the scalability of NT Server and its BackOffice suite for larger configurations. NT currently only scales to four Intel processors. NonStop Tuxedo extends the BEA Tuxedo OLTP software into clustered environments; DOM/MP is an object request broker; while NonStop Server for Java is an implementation of JDK 1.1.1. SQL/MX ships in the fall – an SDK is available next month. Tuxedo for Himalayas ships next month. Tuxedo for NT is out now while Java-based BEA Jolt extensions will be available next month. DOM for Himalayas is shipping now while NonStop Server for Java is due in the fall. Tandem’s ServerNet and ServerWare buddy Unisys Corp will be selling the NonStop software on its NT systems and Tandem says the NonStop software will also be available for other vendors’ hardware though it doesn’t say which. Tandem claims a NonStop clustered NT system will be around a third of the price of a similar Unix system.
