Ray Van Eng (07/07/97)
In less than two decades, the PC has evolved from a simple machine for math calculation, word processing and playing PacMan games to become an extremely powerful piece of equipment capable of handling such mainframe tasks as processing millions of commercial transactions per day. What is even more amazing is that the PC has barely gain in size. Compared to some room-size big irons which weight more than a ton, PCs have remained at heart a desktop device. Of course, hardware alone is only half of the story. Without software, computers would be just another mass of iron and silicon. In the case with Compaq and Tandem, the Microsoft Windows NT operating system is featured prominently. Windows NT is no stranger to the two companies. While Compaq has a line of NT server products for small to mid size companies, Tandem is extending its Himalaya line of fault tolerant system which is used to run Fortune 100 companies to embrace the Windows NT operating system. It is easy to break a single arrow, but it is much tougher to do damage to a bunch of arrows bundled together. It is the same thing with computers. Clustering technology allows a number of personal computers running the same operating system to be bundled together to tackle a heavy duty computer task that might require a mini- or even a mainframe computer. Oracle Corp. and Intel Corp. has just that idea in mind when they agreed to work together to better integrate the newly announced Oracle 8 enterprise database server with Intel's next generation 64-bit microprocessors it is developing with Hewlett-Packard Co. Oracle and Intel will explore clustering technology that
allows companies to combine the processing power of more than one computer
to run a single database application. |
