The SCO Group, Inc. today announced the shipment of SCO OpenServer™ 6, a multi-year, multi-million dollar development effort that has produced a significant upgrade to SCO’s flagship UNIX operating system. SCO OpenServer 6 has been designed to provide customers with increased productivity, greater security, more agility through Open Source technologies and protection of customers’ investments by providing backward compatibility with existing applications.
“The shipment of SCO OpenServer 6 is the culmination of extensive customer feedback, testing by hundreds of product beta testers, certification testing with dozens of SCO software and hardware partners, and significant preparation by SCO engineering, support, marketing and sales teams,” said Darl McBride, president and CEO, The SCO Group, Inc. “The development of one of the most powerful and reliable UNIX operating systems for the Intel and AMD platform continues. Our resellers and customers can feel confident in deploying SCO OpenServer 6 for the increased performance, security and reliability that they have come to depend on from SCO.”
“As the worldwide market share leader of SCO UNIX installations, HP is focused on delivering the latest technologies to HP ProLiant customers,” said Paul Miller, vice president of marketing, Industry Standard Servers, HP. “With the release of SCO OpenServer 6, HP continues to build on our leadership position of supporting SCO UNIX operating systems on HP ProLiant servers. Aligned with availability, HP will release a robust portfolio of SCO OpenServer 6 certifications on HP ProLiant platforms, storage, and networking options offering customers the best managed infrastructure for SCO deployments.”
In developing SCO OpenServer 6 the design team included the UNIX System V Release 5 (SVR5) technology that has been proven in SCO UnixWare® 7. SCO has successfully integrated SVR5 into SCO OpenServer 6, which now provides customers with a significant increase in performance and a greater choice of applications that run on both UnixWare 7 and SCO OpenServer. Software vendors benefit by developing and certifying applications once that run on both UNIX operating systems, saving significant time and development resources without having to recompile applications.
Built for Productivity
In addition to significantly increased performance, in some cases two to four times the performance of the previous version, SCO OpenServer 6 customers will gain greater capabilities in the number of supported processors, increased memory and large file size support. These include:
Multi-Threaded Application Support—SCO OpenServer 6 supports multi- threaded applications with native SVR5 kernel support, which increases the overall response and performance of applications. The pre-emptive SVR5 kernel supports multi-threading for C, C++, and Java applications through the POSIX interface.
Large File Size Support—SCO OpenServer 6 supports file sizes up to 1 TB, for both disk-based and network files. File systems can grow as large as 1 TB, and larger network files are supported through Network File System (NFS) v3.
Multi-Processor Support—SCO OpenServer 6 now supports up to 32 processors.
Increased Memory Support—General applications running on SCO OpenServer 6 can utilize up to 16 GB of general purpose memory, while additional memory can be dedicated for special applications, allowing databases to access up to 64 GB of memory.
Built for Security
SCO OpenServer 6 builds upon its heritage as one of the most secure and reliable operating systems available with the addition of several security enhancements including SSH for remotely logging onto systems using encryption, IP firewall filter for regulating IP traffic and IPsec for virtual private networking. Encrypted file and file system capabilities are also included.
Built for Agility
In addition to supporting numerous UNIX applications, as well as Java applications with the inclusion of Java 1.4.2, customers will also find thousands of additional applications available through many of the latest Open Source technologies that are integrated into SCO OpenServer 6. This includes the latest versions of the MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, Apache Web server, Mozilla browser, Tomcat Java servlet container, Samba file and print services, and many others.
In addition, SCO OpenServer customers can use the familiar OpenServer desktop or use the KDE3-based desktop environment. SCO OpenServer 6 also supports the Firefox browser and OpenOffice suite of applications.
“As enterprise customers continue to embrace open source as a strategic direction, they’re looking to build solutions that provide the robustness and scalability they require,” said Emma McGrattan, vice president of Ingres development at Computer Associates. “With the availability of CA’s Ingres r3 on SCO OpenServer 6, these customers have an open systems server platform and an open source DBMS on which they can fulfill even the most demanding systems requirements.”
Built to Protect The Customers’ Investment
Compatibility with prior versions of SCO OpenServer is critical to customers and SCO continues to provide that with SCO OpenServer 6, preserving the investment of customers’ know-how and training in their SCO OpenServer environment. SCO OpenServer 6 runs existing applications, dating back to applications that were designed for SCO Xenix. SCO also continues many other SCO OpenServer-style capabilities from security levels, look-and-feel, and other tools.
“As the flag bearer of the UNIX on Intel environment, it’s encouraging to see the SCO Group continuing their development of SCO OpenServer,” said Dan Kusnetzky, program vice president, System Software, Enterprise Computing Group, IDC. “Based on the performance and security improvements, as well as integration with many popular Open Source technologies now found in SCO OpenServer 6, the SCO Group has given its customers quite a number of reasons to upgrade and continue investing in the SCO OpenServer platform. SCO’s focus on research and development of SCO OpenServer will allow customers to continue realizing the benefits of the reliability and stability of UNIX running on industry standard hardware.”
WebConnect for SCO OpenServer 6 Customers
SCO has partnered with Ericom Software to offer Ericom’s PowerTerm® technology as part of the SCO OpenServer 6 release. The availability of Ericom’s PowerTerm WebConnect for SCO OpenServer provides SCO customers with a comprehensive server-based computing solution that provides secure local and remote access to SCO character-based applications, Windows applications running on Windows Terminal Server 2000, 2003 and 2003×64, and other legacy applications running on mainframes, AS/400, OpenVMS, UNIX and more.
Availability & Pricing
SCO OpenServer 6 is now available to customers worldwide. For more information on ordering SCO OpenServer 6, customers should contact their local reseller found at http://partners.sco.com/partner/locator/region.jsp or call 1-800-SCO-UNIX (726-8649). SCO OpenServer 6 is available in two editions: the Starter Edition, priced at $599 and the Enterprise Edition, priced at $1399. The Starter Edition provides a two-user license and supports up to 1 GB of system memory and one processor. The Enterprise Edition provides a 10-user license and supports up to 4 GB of system memory and four processors.
For more information on SCO OpenServer 6 visit the product information pages on SCO’s Web site at www.sco.com/products/openserver6/.
