August 28, 1996 12:15 PM PDT
Veritas, Softway in NT march
Veritas Software and Softway Systems are the latest in a long line of independent software vendors (ISVs) to announce they are porting their Unix-based products to the Windows NT platform.
Industry analysts and NT growth predictions indicate that any software developer that is not writing their applications for Windows NT should start doing so soon.
In Softway's case, this move started with a software development kit. For Veritas, the announcement is particularly timely in light of various Windows NT-based failover clustering solutions that have already hit the market or will be offered by the end of the year.
Veritas announced plans for a suite of applications called the Veritas ServerSuite, a set of products addressing availability and manageability on mission-critical, Windows NT-based networks.
Veritas FirstWatch for Windows NT 4.0 has already gotten the attention of a large systems vendor, Data General, who is planning to offer the software with its Aviion line of Pentium Pro servers as a failover clustering solution.
FirstWatch offers failover monitoring and recovery services for Windows NT applications such as databases. If one server fails for any reason, the software moves the processes and applications to the secondary server, minimizing system downtime. The Windows NT product features a new Web-based GUI (graphical user interface).
The second product, Veritas Volume Manager for Windows NT, is a storage management application that when used with FirstWatch provides storage monitoring and optimization capabilities to increase overall system performance. The product supports Redundant Array of Independent Disk (RAID) Levels 0, 1, and 5.
FirstWatch will be available by the end of this year and is priced at $5,000 for a dual-server failover configuration. Volume Manager will be available by March of 1997. No pricing has been set.
Softway Systems also announced new and enhanced products for networks with both Windows NT and Unix systems.
Softway's OpenNT Commands and Utilities 1.1 is an enhanced application offering a Unix-style operating environment on top of Windows NT. It adheres to the POSIX.1 and POSIX.2 standards for NT. A primary enhancement is that it allows users to use both Unix and NT-based commands.
The OpenNT Software Development Kit is a set of tools that lets users port Unix applications to the NT platform. Applications built with the kit run in native mode as 32-bit binary applications in a Windows NT environment. It uses Microsoft's C++ compiler and linker technologies.
OpenNT Telnet Server offer multiuser telnet services for NT. This means multiple remote users can access Windows NT networks over intranet or Internet connections.
OpenNT Commands and Utilities Release 1.1 is priced at $199 for a single-processor license. The OpenNT Software Development Kit 1.1 is $99 for a single-processor license. The Telnet Server 1.0 costs $99 for a single-user license.
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Data General hops on Aviion
