InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

SCO says UnixWare 7 DCE is certified to be down for no more than one hour per year. ICL, a Slough, England, company that sells Intel servers, retail systems, and services, worked with SCO on UnixWare 7 DCE and will run Oracle Financials for 1,300 users on it because of its high reliability. "Our priority is that the [system] keeps running," says Peter Slavid, ICL's business strategy manager. "We're a $4 billion business. If we're down for a day, that's a lot of money."

The operating system offers 36-bit memory addressing. It supports 32 Gbytes of memory and eight processors in a standard configuration, and can be upgraded to 64 Gbytes for users who license support for up to 32 CPUs.

A single interface for event logging helps to provide serviceability. With other Unix operating systems, system resources and commands are typically found throughout the code, making them difficult to manage; SCO ships a MySQL database to provide one interface for easy diagnostics and management. The product is also part of the UnixWare Release 7.1 line, so it includes the Webtop feature that lets IT managers administer UnixWare servers from browsers on clients. It also supports hot-pluggable PCI cards.

Together, these features make this version of UnixWare 7 viable for high-end requirements, an analyst says. "SCO has a platform with a credible amount of data-center features, comparable or ahead of RISC-based Unix vendors," though it's difficult to make direct comparisons, says Gregg Weiss, a senior analyst with D.H. Brown Associates. But more important, he says that "for companies committed to Intel, it's a good choice and a lot more scalable than Linux or Solaris [on Intel]."

True to Intel's commodity-computing model, pricing for UnixWare 7 DCE starts at less than $10,000 for a 150-user license. "Competing on price in the data center is different, but we're getting people to think about it," says Tamar Newberger, SCO's director of product marketing.