Novell musters cluster strength

As the vendor prepares to reveal its plans, NCR UK is poised tolaunch its own clustering scheme

Novell will break its silence on clustering by unveiling its own solution for uniting hundreds of servers at its Brainshare developers' conference in March.

As the industry draws the battle lines around different technologies for clustering NT and Unix servers, Novell is targeting alliances that will give it a headstart among telecoms and utilities suppliers.

The company's Wolf Mountain technology, co-developed with Intel, is an offshoot of Netware, confided one analyst who had received a preview.

It will run on Intel's forthcoming 64-bit processor, Merced, and will integrate NT and Unix clusters, with hundreds operating within a single system image and providing failover for processors that go down.

Most clustering initiatives so far have focused on just one operating system, although a Pyramid-Tandem joint effort is looking to bridge the two.

It seems likely that Microsoft - which last announced an agreement with Pyramid to offer system management based on Pyramid's Transview across NT and Unix - will extend this relationship to bring further Unix support into its own NT clustering technology, Wolfpack. Wolfpack is also backed by Compaq.

The main work in the Unix camp is being done by SCO - which also has Intel involved - and IBM, with its Phoenix clustering interfaces.

Wolf Mountain will not be ready until the last quarter of 1997, at the earliest. Novell would not comment on the product.

Next month NCR UK will roll out a new package for the channel, focused on high-availability computing.

Under the certified operating environment (COE) programme, distributors and resellers will be able to offer NCR's Worldmark servers running Windows and NCR's Lifekeeper fault-tolerant middleware.

The product was initially launched to the company's US resellers at Comdex.

The programme will enable resellers to create recovery software scripts for specific customer applications. These scripts will work with Lifekeeper to protect from system failure. Resellers will also be able to offer an application recovery service for packages including Microsoft Exchange, Lan Manager, SQL Server and Lotus Notes.