Fed up vendors await Wolfpack

Microsoft?s Wolfpack clustering software has been delayed for the second time this year and is not now expected until early autumn.

Representatives at the company?s Redmond headquarters officially insist that Wolfpack is on track for release by the end of June but technology partners such as HP and NCR say they don?t expect it to be commercially available until sometime in the third quarter.

?Unofficially, Microsoft has told us it is going to be delayed,? an executive from one PC vendor said.

News of the delay follows a period of unease last month between the seven members of the Wolfpack supporters group: Digital, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Tandem, Compaq and Intel. Tandem accused Digital of selling the clustering system before phase one was even released while Compaq blew fire at Microsoft for working too closely with Digital.

Although 99 per cent of Wolfpack code is Microsoft code, many companies have contributed algorithms and the gang of seven are supposed to co-ordinate in testing the software.

Many vendors have lost patience waiting for Wolfpack and the delay could give clustering solutions from other major vendors the opportunity to become standard. Data General announced last month that it had ported its Guardware clustered Unix failover software to its Aviion NT line of servers rather than wait for Wolfpack.

Digital, IBM and Novell have their own technologies in various stages of development.

Wolfpack is also facing increased pressure from ramped-up parallel processing technologies that can run NT.