New SCO Server Springs From a 'Legend'

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SCO has officially launched OpenServer 6, its newest flagship Unix server formerly known as ”Legend”. The new server comes as SCO’s legal battles with Novell, IBM and others in the Linux world continue unabated.

At the heart of OpenServer 6, which was designed to bridge the gap between Unixware and Open Server, is the SCO-owned Unix System V Release 5 (SVR5) technology that powers UNIXware 7. SCO claims that vendors can now more easily develop and certify applications that will run on either platform thanks to the shared technology base.

The SVR5 kernel also provides for improved multi-threaded application support for C, C++ and Java applications. The company intends this to improve overall performance and response times.

Beyond using SVR5 as a base, SCO has also made a number of performance-related improvements to its new server.

OpenServer now supports file sizes of up to 1TB for local-disk based and network files and has the potential to support even larger network files for Network File System (NFS) 3 users. Memory support has been boosted up to a whopping 64GB for certain database applications while general applications have been increased to a 16GB memory allotment.

OpenServer 6 also has increased CPU support over its predecessors and boasts support for up to 32 processors.

On the ”open” side of things, SCO has powered OpenServer with a strong list of open source applications. It includes the Apache Web server, Mozilla Firefox, PostgreSQL and MySQL databases, Samba and OpenOffice.org. SCO has even provided users with the option of using the open source KDE 3 desktop environment.

Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata, doesn’t think OpenServer 6 makes SCO any more relevant as a product company, though he admits the company had released a good product.

”The days when a new release of OpenServer can return SCO to a relevant company are long past,” Haff told internetnews.com. ”It’s a fine new release of OpenServer that, at long last, largely merges the Unixware and OpenServer branches of Unix development. The OpenServer installed base will like this well enough.

”But OpenServer ultimately doesn’t have a future,” Haff continued. ”That’s been taken largely by Windows and Linux.”

This article was first published on internetnews.com.