“The NonStop Clusters feature means that collections of
computers using SCO’s UnixWare operating system will be better able
to withstand crashes and can be made powerful more easily by adding
new computers to the cluster. The clustering software connects up
to 12 nodes in a cluster that from the outside looks like a single
computer system.
The offering brings SCO’s operating system up to par with
other versions of Unix such as Sun Microsystems’ Solaris,
which offers clustering capability. It also reinforces SCO’s
effort to stay a few steps ahead of Linux, a close relative of
Unix that runs on the same Intel-based hardware as SCO’s
products.
While Linux is good for one type of clustering–ganging together
lots of machines to tackle heavy-duty number crunching–efforts at
adding business-oriented clustering features are comparatively
immature. Those features include failover, in which one computer
steps in when another crashes, and load-balancing, in which jobs
are evenly distributed among all the computers in a cluster.”