Fulfilling a promise made in April 2002, SCO Group
Thursday delivered the OpenServer Kernel Personality (OKP) for UnixWare
7.1.3, providing a way for SCO’s OpenServer customers to migrate to its
more robust UnixWare 7.1.3 offering.
OpenServer is one of the few Unices still on the market that conforms to
the outmoded Unix93 standard (UnixWare conforms to the Unix95 standard, and
the current standard is Unix98). It is most often used as a platform for
relaying data from point-of-sale machines to back-end systems. But
OpenServer has seen little in the way of development for years, and does
not support much of the newer hardware available, meaning that hardware
choices for OpenServer customers are limited.
At the same time, many OpenServer customers have been content with what
they have, and shown little willingness to migrate upwards, as shown by
SCO’s failed past attempts to sway OpenServer users and resellers to move
to its UnixWare product line. Part of that can be attributed to UnixWare’s
increased expense, but also due to the expense of porting existing
OpenServer applications — which do already do the job — to UnixWare.
OKP is intended as the answer for these customers by providing a bridge
that will allow applications written for OpenServer 5.0.4 and later to run
on UnixWare.
“OKP provides more choices for OpenServer customers,” said Jeff Hunsaker,
senior vice president of marketing for SCO. “They can choose to continue to
update their OpenServer environments, or they can use UnixWare 7.1.3 with
OKP. Either way, the customer is assured that their investment in
OpenServer applications is protected.”
Those customers that choose to make the leap from OpenServer to UnixWare
with OKP will see a number of benefits, SCO claimed, including increased
reliability through Reliant HA Clusters, support for up to 32 CPUs per
server, support for hot plug CPU, hot add memory, and hot plug PCI.
“For customers that have a need for these benefits, OKP is ideal because it
protects your investment in OpenServer applications and avoids costly
end-user re-training.”
SCO said OKP is available immediately as an add-on to UnixWare 7.1.3 and
can be downloaded from the Web. Beginning Friday, the company said it will
be packaged into the UnixWare media kit.
