Mountain View, California-based Pyramid Technology Corp has introduced Valence Cluster, first fruits of its co-development with Oracle Corp, to provide clustering capabilities for its MIServer and ES range of servers supporting the Oracle7 Parallel Server database. Pyramid says up to four machines, each with 24 processors, can be configured to share the Oracle database dynamically, which is claimed to increase transaction throughput to the database threefold and significantly improves data availability to users. Valence also embraces redundancy technology which protects users from single points of failure, irrespective of hardware, software or network failure. Support for other parallel database developers including Informix Software Inc and Sybase Inc will be added in the future. Pyramid OEM customers including Ing Olivetti & Co SpA, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG and ICL Plc all have rights to rebadge the technology but have yet to go public, it says. Valence Cluster is from $200,000 up.