Banyan Systems Inc, Westborough, Massachusetts has been doing the rounds of the major Unix system vendors and now has deals with Sun Microsystems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and IBM Corp to put the Vines enterprise network services up on their RISC-based systems. In the deal with IBM Corp’s Advanced Workstation Division, availability is set for for the first quarter of next year. As with the other iterations, the offering will be an implementation of Banyan’s Posix-compliant user services and streams-based protocol stack. Until last year the Banyan’s only offering was a native network operating system built on a customised version of Unix V.3.2 for Intel Corp iAPX-86 systems, which hid Unix from the user. Its first implementation for an existing Unix was for Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s offering at the end of last year. The planned Hewlett-Packard Co version is set for the fourth quarter and the Sun Microsystems Inc version for the first half of next year. Banyan users on these systems will be able to take full advantage of local Unix tools and utilities. The implementations will mean that MS-DOS, Windows, OS/2, Macintosh and Unix users will be able to share data, files, applications and print services. Sun’s Scott McNealy says that his company’s deal was forged after long-term discussions on how the two companies could work together. The two will integrate Vines network services with Solaris for large scale Unix-to-personal computer networking where it will be managed by SunNet Manager. They are also looking at a version of Vines for Solaris X.86, but will first evaluate demand. Banyan claims some 2m Vines users and says that other Unixes are less than 10% of its current business. The company says it is looking at how emerging distributed computing and management technologies might be incorporated into its system, but says it will continue to use its own Remote Procedure Call mechanism for now. Microsoft Corp Windows NT will be supported as a client – Banyan will wait to see how the market shapes up before making a decision to do a version for the server implementation. The strategic relationship with Hewlett-Packard involves technology sharing, joint product development, network attached printer support, technical support alliances and joint marketing.
