Tandem Computers Inc has reorganized into five business units to equip itself for its adventure into Windows NT. A Parallel Platform group under senior VP Kurt Friedrich will house its proprietary Himalaya MPP and NT systems, which are now bound together in the New Tandem (CI No 2,916). A Commercial Platform unit is created under acting chief Roel Pieper, otherwise Tandem’s CEO, who’s putting his Unix experience to work for its Unix, telecommunications and intelligent networking interests. A ServerNet Group under senior VP and general manager Jerry Peterson will sell its ServerNet interconnect stuff to OEMs. A ServerWare Group under senior VP and general manager Bill Heil will commoditize Tandem’s software. And the old Atalla Division under president and general manager Bob Gargua will pursue alliances and partnerships for its network security stuff. The company’s end-user field sales force under senior VP John Losier and a service and support unit under Scott Thompson that reports to Losier remains as before.
100,000 NT clusters in two years
Tandem claims the largest installed base of clustered machines in the world, some 10,000 Himalayas. It’s whole heritage – but for its foray into Unix – has been clustering. It owns what it says are the key clustering patents, called I’m Alive, that cover the software that talks between machines, technology that Microsoft can now access under a new arrangement. Tandem told our sister publication and NT- watcher ClieNT Server News it expects the current fascination with NT clustering to drive 100,000 clustered NT machines into deployment in the next two years. Most of these, it says, will be Intel-based. Either 2 x 4, 3 x 4 or 4 x 4s. Tandem, with its background, aims to be represented in a lot of them. This is where Heil’s new ServerWare unit comes in. If Tandem doesn’t sell the hardware, its software can at least be in them. Tandem has taken the stuff that makes its clusters work and given it to Heil and his team to productize on behalf of NT. It includes its database, transaction processing (TP) software and MSF or Message Switching Facility. Tandem is taking its own familiar Non-Stop SQL database, something that’s already parallel, and moving it over. When Tandem finishes with its NT system the later part of next year, it will also be object-oriented and capable of handling all the multimedia types that Illustra handles. By that time, it will be called something like ServerWare SQL. Tandem currently has mixed transaction processing interests: Tuxedo, CICS and its own proprietary Pathway software, all of which run on Himalayas. It is porting all of it over to NT and to insure that it’s got a corner on the TP market, it’s creating a new class of TP software, object-oriented TP called TP Objects that it expects to come out first, probably in the summer of 1997. It expects this stuff to tie back to its big Himalaya machines and give them more of a reason for being. In fact, it fancies that NT and Himalaya will cross- pollinate: Himalaya because it’s no longer a closed solution; NT because customers can migrate up to an industrial- strength solution when they’ve exhausted NT’s resources. Tandem has licensed Tuxedo since 1993, first from Unix System Labs, Pieper’s old haunt, then from Novell and now from Bea Systems Inc. Tandem created a clustered version of it for Himalaya which it is porting over to NT from the ground up despite the fact an NT version of Tuxedo already exists. It says its port is not just Tuxedo on NT. It is the stuff that makes it fault-tolerant and more scalable and again makes Himalaya more viable. The same is true with CICS whose API Tandem licensed from Micro Focus Plc, parallelized and put on Himalaya. That stuff is going over to NT. Heil has previously claimed to CSN that Himalaya and NT are structurally similar and Himalaya and NT ServerWare products will share the same ode base so porting will be a straightforward recompile. Tandem has snubbed NCR’s TP system Top End in favor of more widely deployed systems. Microsoft of course is working on its own TP system Viper and Tandem intends to interoperate with it but suggests that Viper will be more low end than anything it has.
