Sun unveils road map for Full Moon clustering project's technology.

Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Full Moon clustering project has unveiled a four-phase development and technology road map for new architecture designed to help companies provide a continuous, uninterrupted webtone for access to applications and services on corporate intranets and the Internet.

"As companies extend their business model to the Internet and Java computing, even a few minutes of network downtime can cost thousands of dollars in revenue and lost customer faith," says Steve MacKay, vice president and general manager for Sun's Solaris products group.

The Full Moon architecture will make a company's entire cluster of computers appear as one computer, and it will scale to a large number of processors and nodes. The architecture is based on existing applications programming interfaces (APIs), offering 100 percent compatibility with all applications that run on Solaris.

The architecture will be introduced in four phases:

* Phase One, April 1997. Cluster application programming interface (API), disaster recovery and highly available Internet services to be available in Sun's Solstice HA 1.3;

* Phase Two, late 1997. Easy-to-use Java-based cluster monitoring, multiple logical hosts, additional data services and four-node clusters;

* Phase Three, 1998. Global cluster file system, global networking, global devices access, fast interconnect, Java-based cluster management tools and 8-node clusters;

* Phase Four, 1999. Single system image, global process management and comprehensive Java-based single system image administration capabilities.