Digital Announces Products to Enhance Windows NT and Back Office

If there’s one piece of Digital’s business that Compaq will be thrilled to get, it is the enterprise enhancements that Digital has developed for Windows NT. The products extend the capabilities of both the Windows NT operating system and many BackOffice products. Digital’s plan is to take the expertise it has built up over the years on its OpenVMS and Unix platforms and translate it into products than can address a range of enterprise requirements for customers considering NT for the enterprise class applications.

Key Areas of Focus. Digital’s overall strategy of developing enterprise enhancements for Windows NT currently translates into projects in three specific areas: Continuous Computing, Exchange Add-ons, and Application Development. In each case, the intent is to address opportunities for deploying more robust, scalable, manageable, functional, or highly available Windows NT solutions than are possible with base-level products from Microsoft.

Continuous Computing. In the area of high availability, Digital has announced enhancements to Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS), including the Digital Cluster File System, Distributed Lock Manager, Digital Disaster Tolerant Solutions, Visual Batch, and Reliable Application Server. The Cluster File System provides a cluster-wide view of data and allows applications that are not cluster aware to share data. Distributed Lock Manager protects resources in a shared-everything environment and has APIs that applications can use to achieve cluster-wide synchronization and notification.

The first version of the Disaster Tolerant Solutions is OpenVMS-based and provides Windows NT systems with multi-site disk shadowing, disaster monitoring, and disk services to Windows NT systems. These allow data to be saved to a remote site, providing easier disaster recovery for NT applications. A future version will support an NT back end providing the same capabilities. This feature is not unique, however, with products like Octopus Data Star providing disk, folder, and file mirroring over WAN and LAN connections.

Digital includes its Visual Batch program with its Continuous Computing project, although it is more of a management solution. Nevertheless, Visual Batch will be welcome by frustrated NT system administrators who have had only the crudest of tools to work with in the past to automate operations.

Reliable Application Server is based on Digital’s Reliable Transaction Router (RTR). It adapts RTR to work with Microsoft’s Web server, intercepting ISAPI calls and distributing them. It can provide wide area site shadowing using low bandwidth message replication, providing transparent failover and recovery of a variety of types of transactions such as those involving Microsoft’s Site Server. This is a sorely needed capability in many types of Web applications.

Exchange Enhancements. The Exchange enhancements Digital has announced address several shortcomings in the Microsoft product as well as providing several enhanced applications. The Exchange Vault provides centralized storage of Exchange archives along with centralized policy management. It supports hierarchical storage management (HSM) so that older messages can be moved to lowercase media. Messages are archived and can be retrieved with header information intact, which is not the case with Exchange. Digital is providing an integrated AltaVista indexing and search-and-retrieval capability to help end users find and return archived messages. In the future, Digital will add RTR support for disaster recovery of Exchange message stores.

Exchange Communiqu provides a method for creating distribution lists for messages based on stored profile data and database queries. Profiles can be maintained by individual users, or queries can be created ad hoc to create distribution lists. This addresses a glaring shortcoming of Exchange—the requirement that you have to physically be at the Exchange server to create centrally managed distribution lists.

Document Workflow provides document workflow capabilities on Exchange, including security, document management, basic workflow, and the ability to integrate work folders with other systems using an object-oriented workbench. Another product, Workflow Expeditor, automates the workflow of administrative information using Microsoft Exchange as the message store-and-forward mechanism.

Digital will be adding Exchange to its Mail Monitor product. This management application monitors a customer’s entire messaging environment, including mail servers, directories, gateways, backbone to help prevent downtime and to provide alarms and automatic action routines. Remote management has been one of Exchange’s weakest areas, and Digital is providing critical capabilities with this product.

Application Development. Digital is adding NT support in its Enterprise Toolkit for Visual Studio. This allows developers to develop C and C++ applications in a single visual environment and to deploy distributed applications on OpenVMS, Unix, and NT.

Web Control is a management tool for three-tier application environments. It automatically generates desktop layouts and application selection menus independent of location. This is another attempt by Digital to add a management layer on top of NT in advance of Microsoft’s efforts, in this case Windows Terminal Server (formerly Hydra) and Zero Administration Workstation (ZAW). One of the differences here is that the management is Web based. Customers may pass this one by for a Microsoft-sponsored solution.

Digital is also providing add-ons for Microsoft’s Transaction Server (MTS) that are designed to use the Microsoft infrastructure but provide connectivity to Digital and other transaction environments as well as additional functionality. Among the functions offered will be load-balancing, reliable Web interaction, shared memory storage, invocation control, and advanced process management.

Finally, AltaVista Process Flow is a high-end process-reengineering tool. It provides a multitier workflow application environment that isolates application logic from workflow logic and provides a variety of integration options. History information is collected that can be used for analysis and optimization.

Product Availability. These new NT enhancement products and applications will roll out between February and the fall of 1998. There is no reason to think that this roll-out schedule will be impacted by the Compaq acquisition. These products are a perfect fit for Compaq’s objectives for Digital as a value-added supplier to the enterprise.

Contact:
Digital Equipment Corporation
110 Spit Brook Road
Nashua, NH 03062-2698
Mike Cuccia
Director, Commercial Software Products Marketing
Phone: 603.884.0549
Fax: 603.884.6139
E-Mail: Mike.Cuccia@digital.com
Internet: http://www.windows.digital.com