SCO bids for early Merced Unix lead

SCO has reinforced its bid for leadership in Merced Unix by shipping the second build of its UnixWare for IA-64 to "selected partners." These include "strategic SCO OEMs and ISVs," and will doubtless include Compaq, Data General, ICL, and Unisys, partners with SCO in an effort to make UnixWare the standard data centre Unix. "The availability of this release establishes SCO as the leader on Merced," said Ray Anderson, senior vice president of Marketing, SCO." By providing early availability of IA-64 ready software to OEMs and ISVs, SCO is able to establish the infrastructure needed for solution partners to be successful on Merced." UnixWare for Merced build two is running on Intel's Merced simulator, and consists of a full 64-bit UnixWare kernel and base utility set. According to SCO the kernel takes full advantage of the Merced 64-bit addressing for memory and file access, and IA-64 dynamic library linking is implemented in this release. It also comes with an SDK, available as native IA-64 and hosted in a cross development environment on UnixWare 7 for IA-32. UnixWare for Merced, says SCO, will be able to give applications access to over a terabyte of main memory and up to 8 Exabytes (these are 1024 gigabytes, apparently) file storage. SCO is also aiming UnixWare for Merced at smaller ISVs, and intends to release a software architectural model, designed in conjunction with Intel, that makes allowances for the likelihood that many ISVs won't have an immediate need for the scalability of Merced. These ISVs will be able to recompile their apps simply for Merced as and when they need to. The software architectural model will be implemented over the next quarter, and will be released to ISVs early next year, hosted on UnixWare 7. ® Click for more stories