Novell Inc duly rolled out Orion, its first stab at high- availability for NetWare, with help from its clustering partner Vinca Corp, providing application failover between two Intel- based servers. High-Availability Server for NetWare supports two active NetWare 4.11 servers – details for NetWare 5 will be announced at the end of the month – and requires a shared storage system. An operator can restart applications, including web servers on a second server if the first goes down. The first incarnation of Orion does not cluster-enable applications – automatic parallelization, additional internet, security and Java functionality is anticipated in Orion II. Vinca’s expected to have a hand in development of Novell’s future continuous availability solutions. It’s thinking about a clustered file system, distributed locking, ccNUMA support and how to bring Windows NT machines into the cluster. Prices start at $3,900 per pair of servers.
