Qualix Goes Fulltime With Enterprise High Availability

Computergram International, July 6, 1998

Qualix Group Inc has spent the past year or more re-inventing itself as an enterprise software company and onTuesday, changes its name to FullTime Software Inc and unveils a new cross-platform product suite to reflect its focus on high-availability solutions. The company says its new FullTime Cluster 4.0, Data 4.0, awareness modules and a software development kit can be used to manage planned and unplanned downtime, application and data availability, data replication, failover and mirroring across mixed Unix and NT environments, while event and rules engines can monitor applications, systems and networks - and trigger responses.

FullTime says the software has been tested working across a 40-node Windows NT cluster and will scale to 100 nodes or more. In moving lock, stock and barrel to enterprise high- availability (HA) FullTime's throwing down the gauntlet to a bevy of ISVs pursuing the emerging NT clustering market such as Entersoft, Vinca and Platform Computing, as well as Unix system vendors such as HP, Sun and NCR which are concerned primarily with selling their own servers rather than supporting mixed cluster environments and effectively hardwire HA services to their own systems. The company claims that to utilize FullTime customers need no additional clustering APIs and are not required to make operating system or changes. It expects many customers to use FullTime where they are tying Microsoft BackOffice application servers to Unix back-ends. To create its Cluster program, which provides a common management environment and console across Unix and NT nodes, FullTime has merged code from its HA Unix and Octopus NT programs into a new C/C application. Octopus is derived from Qualix's 1996 acquisition (CI No 3,006) while HA is a clean room implementation of code originally licensed from Veritas Software Corp in 1995. Last year the two settled a long-running legal spat over HA , which FullTime claimed Veritas had been misrepresenting to customers. The customizable rules and event engines use messaging technology FullTime has acquired from Unix and NT fault-tolerant vendor Stratus Computer Inc, as well as from its 1996 Automated Network Technologies Inc buy (CI No 2,920). The company is creating APIs to Tivoli, Legato, BMC and other management applications t hat will enable FullTime to receive alerts and send responses to them. It can also manage Exchange, Notes, IIS, SQL Server, SAP, PeopleSoft, Baan, Oracle, Sybase and Informix application servers. FullTime Data is a new version of the existing DataStar replication and mirroring product. FullTime Cluster is priced from $10,000 on a two-node NT cluster - Solaris, HP-UX and AIX versions follow in the fourth quarter. A UnixWare port of HA is being created for one large customer. FullTime Data is up on NT, Solaris and HP-UX priced from $5,000 on a two-node cluster with AIX due by year-end. Pre-packaged awareness modules for managing application environments will roll out this quarter and next. No prices. FullTime will continue to sell its HA and Octopus products as point products. A FullTime Enterprise suite combining all products will cost from $50,000 per node. FullTime Department application-specific bundles will also be available. More details, Barbed Wire.