Compaq Announces Clustering Roadmap; Compaq, Microsoft and Tandem Team to Drive Industry-Standard Clustering

Business Wire, Oct 16, 1995

HOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 16, 1995--Highly-available, fault-tolerant, business-critical computing systems are the main customer benefits of a clustering product strategy announced today by Compaq Computer Corporation (NYSE:CPQ). A key component of the strategy is a collaboration between Compaq, Microsoft and Tandem to develop an industry standard for clustering - a technique that permits the resources of several computers to be linked.

Compaq and Tandem will collaborate on an industry-standard means of providing high speed, fault-tolerant messaging between clustered servers based on Tandem's ServerNet architecture. This technology will fit into the Windows NT Server availability and scalability (including clustering) strategy recently announced by Microsoft.

Compaq and Microsoft also announced plans to add support for Microsoft SQL Server on the Compaq On-Line Recovery Server to make database recovery for Microsoft SQL Server clients more transparent to the user. This new product will provide levels of fault tolerance normally associated with more expensive and complex parallel database technologies.

Server Array Direction

A cornerstone of today's announcement is Compaq's strategy to deliver "arrays of industry standard servers" -- or server arrays -- initially based on Windows NT Server, to be followed by other industry standard operating systems, such as UNIX and NetWare, over time. Additionally, Compaq plans to work with leading database suppliers such as Oracle, Sybase and Microsoft to integrate their products into this strategy.

Server arrays involve incorporating individual server components to create larger systems which have significant advantages over proprietary mid-range systems which currently fill the high availability, application server market. These advantages include:

o enhanced system availability through redundancy

-- if one server fails, one of its peers will quickly assume the

workload

o a modular pay-as-you-go growth path to even higher availability

and performance

o a new standard for total cost of ownership

"Compaq's Server Array strategy will accelerate penetration of industry standard platforms into business-critical distributed computing environments," said Gary Stimac, senior vice president and general manager, Compaq Systems Division. "Compaq's overall server strategy is to provide the midrange functionality required for business-critical environments at industry standard server price points. Specifically, Compaq's new clustering products are designed to deliver midrange-class availability and scalability to large divisional/departmental database environments and to make midrange-class availability cost-effective for customers who have a large number of business-critical servers deployed at remote or branch locations."

Compaq Clusters for Divisional/Departmental Databases

A key component of the Compaq clustering strategy is a highly available, scalable, shared-disk cluster for servers. Compaq and Tandem have teamed to co-develop and promote the Tandem ServerNet architecture as an industry-standard method for exchanging data between servers. Compaq and Tandem will be developing cost-effective PCI-based ServerNet cards along with ServerNet routers.

"Compaq and Tandem have joined forces to provide customers with a new clustering solution based on Tandem's high performance, `bullet-proof' ServerNet technology and Compaq's industry-standard platforms. For the first time, customers deploying workgroup and divisional/departmental solutions will enjoy high levels of fault tolerance normally available only to customers willing to incur far greater expense," said Stimac.

James Treybig, Tandem's president and CEO said, "Tandem, through its new partnership with Compaq, is pleased to be able to provide its legendary fault-tolerance and scalability to the high-volume market of new customers who depend on industry standard operating environments and hardware for their business solutions."

Compaq and Tandem are also working closely with Microsoft, leading application developers and hardware vendors to help design a clustering API as part of Microsoft's open design process. In order to make clustering as broadly available as possible, Microsoft intends to deliver this key technology for Windows NT Server and Microsoft BackOffice.

According to Stimac, "Shared-disk database clusters have been around in midrange environments for some time. However, non-uniform implementations and non uniform hardware interconnects have resulted in many unique, expensive offerings with widely varying levels of availability and scalability. Compaq's vision includes an industry-standard cluster implementation which does not vary from installation-to installation or even from platform-to platform. We're excited to work with Microsoft to define their cluster API for Windows NT Server."

"Microsoft, Compaq and Tandem have a shared goal of an industry-standard Windows NT Server cluster," said Jim Allchin, senior vice-president of the business systems division at Microsoft. "Microsoft is working to deliver on the vision of commodity clustering so that we can offer customers the same opportunity for choice for clustering that we delivered with industry standard SMP technology in Windows NT Server."