March 24, 1997 1:15 PM ET
Novell's Wolf Mountain ready to rock
By James Gruener

Novell Inc. will formally unveil its Wolf Mountain clustering technology this week, attempting to tie existing clustering methods, network protocols and transports under a common framework. The 64-bit clustering technology, which Novell will demonstrate at its BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City, is designed to provide highly scalable, fault-tolerant services on Intel Corp. servers running Windows NT or Unix, said sources close to Novell. Wolf Mountain, which will run on 32-bit or forthcoming 64-bit Intel systems, includes an "OS Loader" architecture composed of modular, C-based source code, sources said. It includes a symmetric multiprocessing kernel, debugger, memory manager and interrupt system. The OS Loader allows users to plug in other operating systems, such as IntranetWare, NT or Unix. It also will come with a Java Virtual Machine for Java applications. Wolf Mountain will include CICP (Clustering Interconnect Protocol), an abstraction layer designed to support a wide range of clustering solutions, such as No Remote Memory Access, NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access), Cache-Coherent NUMA and, eventually, I20, sources said. It also will support IPX, TCP/IP and Native IP protocols. CICP will work with a variety of subsystems, including Fibre Channel and Serial Storage Architecture systems, across LAN, asynchronous transfer mode, fiber and other network transports, the sources said. Wolf Mountain includes a Unified File Object Directory that uses three-dimensional storage address space and provides fault-tolerant clustering. The directory provides support for distributed caching, disk pooling and segment mirroring, sources said. It will work with NetWare Core Protocol, Novell Directory Services and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, they said. The Novell clustering technology is due commercially late this year, sources said. Novell officials in Provo, Utah, declined to comment. Copyright(c) 1997 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff-Davis Publishing Company is prohibited. PC Week and the PC Week logo are trademarks of Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. PC Week Online and the PC Week Online logo are trademarks of Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. Send mail to PC Week