With a slightly different focus, in Client-Server Platforms: Systems
and Software for a Distributed Future, Business Research Group has reported
that NT will be the server of choice for mission-critical applications within
two years. However, this report does repeat the warning that "NT Server may
become vulnerable as companies attempt to scale to increased numbers of users,
servers, and locations."
These figures are probably too generous as a measure of the financial
services sector alone. Microsoft's figures on the market can serve only as a
guide because they do not differentiate between back office applications and
clients at the desktop, which have been markedly more successful. But in the
retail banking sector, Microsoft claims to hold 28 percent of the market in the
UK and US, rising to over 70 percent in Scandinavia.
Against this background, you can appreciate the significance of the
Microsoft Wolfpack cluster standard for NT's future. The importance of failover
solutions that rely on clustering (a group of independent systems working
together as one system) to deliver scaleability and availability cannot be
overemphasized. The 1992 FIND/SVP Strategic Research Division estimated that
system downtime costs US business $4 billion per year. The subject of downtime
in the securities industry is even more sensitive, because the average event
results in losses three times the size of such losses in, say, the retail
industry, at $450,000. Microsoft's strategic announcement to support online
banking at the end of 1995 recognized the business advantage to financials of
having a single, scaleable operating system underpinning a delivery
infrastructure. And so good reasons lie behind Tandem's participation in
Wolfpack.
Tandem and Microsoft
Tandem made its name with the delivery of
continuously available OnLine Transaction Processing (OLTP) solutions and
currently holds 70 percent of the global market. Within the financial sector,
Tandem's NonStop Himalaya NonStop Kernel and Integrity UNIX systems run 75
percent of all cash dispensers and 66 percent of credit card systems. In
addition, 40 of the world's busiest stock exchanges, including the New York
Stock Exchange, run on Tandem machines.
The announcement in November was the culmination of a series of moves
between the two companies in recent months. In September, Tandem announced a set
of automated storage-management solutions, designed in part to improve the cost
effectiveness of transaction processing on clustered NT Server-based systems. In
August, Tandem and BEA Systems signed a licensing agreement under which Tandem
will extend its open systems strategy for OLTP over the next few years by using
BEA TUXEDO transaction monitor middleware as part of the NT cluster servers. And
most recently, in line with the ITP commitment, Microsoft and Tandem have
published a Java specification for Transaction Internet Protocol (TIP), for
tying transaction processing systems together across the Internet. This
specification is now in the open market for comment. The November event unveiled
the boxes at the heart of these developments, a new S-Series line of servers in
two families, one Himalaya and one NT. These products are due to start rolling
out in the first half of 1997.
Two Tandem technologies are key to the success of the alliance. The cluster
interconnect technology, ServerNet, and the middleware solution, ServerWare.
The Technology
Tandem refers to ServerNet as a system area
network (SAN), a network that runs inside the computer. At its core, this system
is designed to tackle the problem of latency, the bugbear of log jams, which are
too familiar to those who need to manipulate gigabytes of data and handle
thousands of online transactions per hour. Analysts recognize that though
ServerNet is similar to packet switching interconnects, Tandem's solution is
significantly different from bus-oriented systems. It adopts the "fabric"
approach: Data can bypass a server's processor and memory units in a series of
any-to-any links through high-speed connections and smart switches. If a system
is under a heavy load, ServerNet finds alternative paths for basic I/O
operations such as memory fetches and peripheral accesses. And the performance
of the technology is impressive, tackling the most critical of system
bottlenecks--memory buses--and eliminating up to 30 percent of unwanted cycles
in some I/O applications. In addition to its offerings, Tandem is working with
Wolfpack partners to make ServerNet the de facto industry standard for
connecting clustered NT Server-based systems, and then to license the technology
to Microsoft.
ServerWare is the set of cross-platform database, memory, and transaction
processing software for clustered systems. The technology will run on any
computer that supports either the NonStop Himalaya server's NonStop Kernel OS or
the Wolfpack clustering software, but Tandem believes ServerWare will work best
on ServerNet-enabled computers.
ServerWare supports a variety of approaches to transaction processing, from
API to object-oriented approaches. Tandem believes this capability makes
ServerWare a rich application environment and hopes it will become a solution
magnet for transaction processing in NT solutions. The company recognizes that
the 22 years it has taken to build the base of major clients running
business-critical cluster computers will be out-stripped in the next two years
when Compaq (another partner in the Wolfpack project) and Microsoft build a base
of 100,000 clustered computers. With this scenario in mind, Tandem has released
ServerWare for use on competitor Wolfpack cluster systems (as well as on its
own) by licensing the technology to Microsoft. This way, all solutions can run
ServerWare.
Targeted Technology
The deployment of these two technologies is
designed to directly address the financial services community's NT concerns by
providing an opportunity for an unprecedented level of robustness and
scaleability in the NT environment. With an eye on the future, both Tandem and
Microsoft have made clear that they also have their sights on the expected
further leap in volume requirements as a result of online personal financial
services, including Internet banking. This development will necessitate the transactivating
of the Web.
The Internet's future, with its demands for effectively unlimited
transaction processing capability, is merely another leap up the ladder of
online volume demand. When the next wave of NT Server-based products with
clustering becomes available next year, Microsoft will be at the helm, meeting
the necessities of 24 * 7 availability and scaleability.
With Microsoft and Tandem now committed to clustering and with additional
solution announcements, such as the NT-based Merchant Server for credit card
transaction processing (online shopping will be worth $6.6 billion by 2000),
Microsoft's competitors will have to work hard indeed to outrun the Wolfpack.
—Mark Vernon
Novell Plays Microsoft's Giveaway Game
Meeting Microsoft on its own playing field, Novell is now offering
Novell Directory Services (NDS) for free. UNIX vendors, application developers,
or Internet service providers (ISPs) can have the NDS source code at no cost if
they include NDS in their products. A binary version of NDS for Windows NT will
be available to OEM partners early this year.
—Valda Hilley
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