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Sun's Project Cascade Introduces More Unix-NT Integration

Sun Microsystems Inc. took the next step into the Unix-NT leveraging market in New York yesterday when it announced Project Cascade: its plans to provide interoperability and compatibility between Sun and Microsoft Corp. systems, providing Sun customers with easy plug-ins to Windows NT environments.

The first part of the plan is a technology agreement with AT&T that allows both SPARC- and Intel-based Solaris systems to provide native Windows NT services, opening up a new market for Sun’s enterprise servers that will provide native NT functions such as naming, authentication, file and print sharing.

Another part of the announcement introduces a new add-in card that enables users of Sun’s Ultra workstations to run Windows and DOS applications at native speed performance. The SunPCi co-processor allows everything from viewing applications to sharing applications, and of course running Windows applications.

Finally, Sun also announced that it is working toward linking its entire line of storage systems – everything from the entry-level Sun StorEdge A1000 array and the fibre channel-based Sun StorEdge A5000 to the high-end Sun StorEdge A7000 Intelligent Storage Server system and Sun StorEdge tape libraries – directly into NT environments by year end. Sun says that when used with Project Cascade technology, Sun StorEdge systems can support not only Solaris-based NT network services, but NT application servers as well.

According to Zona Research Inc. (Redwood City, Calif.), Project Cascade is Sun’s answer to Microsoft’s Unix Performance pack on NT. The product was directed towards the ISP market, enabling administrators to migrate their maintenance and administration scripts directly to NT without rewrite. Zona says Project Cascade looks to stymie NT’s surge into the domain controller and resource server market, taking up where Novell left off. – Brian Ploskina, Assistant Editor

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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