Vinca Corp claims its Co-StandbyServer for Windows NT, which will ship at the beginning of next month, is the only hardware- independent server failover software available and ready for use in the market. Co-Standby Server is an NT iteration of the company’s Standby Server, developed originally for Novell Inc’s Netware. It enables automatic disk mirroring on two active clustered servers, both of which may be running a full suite of applications, so that if one fails the other takes over almost instantly (CI No 3,305). What is unique, says Vinca, is that the two servers can be from any hardware vendor, using virtually any interconnect. All they require is an equal amount of spare disk space on each. The company expects Co-Server to turn up in the offerings of many of the hardware manufacturers, most of whose current offerings are more proprietary and require both servers to be their own. Vinca has already announced a deal with Tandem Computers Inc, with whom it did some joint development on Co- Standby Server, which sees Co-Standby Server bundled with Tandem’s ServerNet high speed interconnect (CI No 3,305). Late last year the company announced that IBM Corp will include Vinca’s StandbyServer products in its Netfinity Cluster pack for the IBM Netfinity and IBM PC Server, offering five different high availability options from Vinca. Earlier this week, Novell announced it will resell Vinca’s StandbyServer (CI No 3,330), and Vinca executive Susan Richards says Novell will package it as a Novell product, which will replace Novell’s own SFT III automatic recovery software for Netware 3.x, which never supported SFT III, and for the forthcoming Moab or Netware 5. Vinca says at present its revenue is split around 60% from Novell, and 40% NT and OS/2, but with the shipment of Co-StandbyServer, it expects the balance to end up around 70% NT. Richards also confirmed that the Novell deal is a three-year agreement, and will cover more than one product. While Novell did not confirm or deny the likelihood of Vinca’s product turning up in its Orion 16-way clustering, due in early 1999, Vinca suggested its software would definitely feature in Orion. Roger Llewellyn, Vinca regional manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa, said Novell seemed to be re-defining its niche as an infrastructure player, where Netware and IntraNetware will continue to be widely used for the basic networking of PCs and servers, while NT is gaining ground in the application space. Vinca has worked closely with Microsoft Corp on its NT product, both directly and through its relationship with Tandem. For the Co-StandbyServer, Vinca has written its own mirroring code to enable the use of two active servers for failover. Also, it has added to NT the ability to take down one server cleanly for maintenance, and then bring it back up without having to re- mirror the whole disk. Co-StandbyServer enables only changes made since the beginning of the maintenance outage to be updated, and the product also offers a remote management console, which will be browser-based in the next release.
