Digital Spells Out Clustering Initiative With Microsoft

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March 02, 1998 (1:03 PM EST)

Digital Spells Out Clustering Initiative With Microsoft

By Amy Rogers,

When the chief executives of Digital Equipment and Microsoft said in January that their companies would tackle more cooperative development projects, they were long on vision but short on specifics.

To fill in the gaps -- and to reclaim some of the thunder Compaq stole by announcing its intentions to buy Digital a few days before the Microsoft/Digital love-in -- Digital executives went back on the road this week to offer details of the company's plans.

Digital is concentrating on enhancing Microsoft's Cluster Server, Exchange Server, and development tools. Extensions to Cluster Server are a key focus, said Mike Cuccia, director of marketing for Digital's commercial software products.

Digital will apply shared-disk technology used in its Tru-Cluster products to Cluster Server, today built on a "shared-nothing" architecture in which clustered machines can access only their own disks.

Cuccia said that the cluster-wide file system available with the shared-disk approach protects data integrity when multiple users on the cluster access an application.

Digital also is building a Cluster Server extension for high-value transactions, with disaster-tolerant capabilities such as full replication among nodes up to 100 miles apart. Another product, Reliable Web Services, will help systems administrators establish "failover" servers in a cluster that will take over for a primary server if the connection to the primary fails.

For Exchange, Digital is adding more groupware capabilities with its Expediter software and is planning a July delivery of Vault, which will migrate mail messages from the Exchange Server disk to cheaper CD-ROM storage. Users will still be able to access and reply to their messages, Cuccia said.

Another product, Digital Communique, will permit users to build dynamic distribution lists from network directories that are compliant with the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol.

Cuccia said that all the products will be rolled out over the next year and a half, and that the software will be made available both for Intel and Digital Alpha chip sets.

Jim Garden, director of technical services at market researcher Technology Business Research, said that Digital, Unisys, and other old-school enterprise computing companies are lining up to partner with Microsoft for several reasons.

"These companies are switching to solutions-provider roles that can [function] in such a way as to fill their product voids," Garden said.