Unison Software Inc, the distributed systems management company that started life as a HP 3000 shop and is now doing half of its business on Unix, with some Windows NT, has the latest version of its RoadRunner back-up software ready for market. RoadRunner 2.0 comes with a new graphical user interface, claimed improvements in network performance, integration with Hewlett-Packard Co’s OpenView OperationsCenter, expanded peripheral support and back-up to disk files. Release 2.0 can back-up or restore 32 parallel tape drives, comes with templates and tools for OpenView administrators to monitor RoadRunner messages and take action, back-up to disks – which can subsequently copy to slower tape drives – and new algorithms said to accelerate network data transfer by 100% over the previous version. Version 2.0 is claimed to back up 60Gb per hour in optimised configurations. HP-UX, AIX and Solaris are the company’s first-tier Unix implementations; iAPX-86 and MIPS applications binary interface sets and Windows NT are its second wave. Unison has now got all of its workload management (Maestro, LoadBalancer, Express), some output management (Unix spooling is possible from MPE Spoolmate) and a couple of storage management products (including RoadRunner) under Unix. The company expects to begin providing products for the management of application-specific environments, such as PeopleSoft, SAP and Oracle Financials, as well as integrating its utilities with systems management frameworks and tools. The newly-quoted company counts Hewlett-Packard, SAP AG and Sequent Computer Systems Inc as its key OEM customers, and claims to have others in the bag. Unison has also put out an initial release of its Maestro job-scheduling software for NT, in which a Unix master can now recognise Windows NT machines on the network, though the agents can only execute one command at a time before reporting back. A second go at the Windows NT work will have a fault-tolerant agent on the network for Windows NT, while a third and final release of the full Maestro service for NT is due in the third quarter of 1996. Versions of company’s RoadRunner and LoadBalancer packages for Windows NT will follow, though it’s not sure yet what kind of load-balancing Windows NT will require. It claims 7,000 licensees, up from 4,000 six months ago.
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