Representatives from Datapoint Corp, Novell Inc, Advanced Digital Information Corp and Novell Inc and several other US data communications companies, gathered in Vail, Colorado last week to meet under the chairmanship of Delbert Jones, director of the US National LAN Laboratory in Washington to agree on recommendations that should be made to manufacturers and users […]
Representatives from Datapoint Corp, Novell Inc, Advanced Digital Information Corp and Novell Inc and several other US data communications companies, gathered in Vail, Colorado last week to meet under the chairmanship of Delbert Jones, director of the US National LAN Laboratory in Washington to agree on recommendations that should be made to manufacturers and users to improve reliability of multi-vendor networks, and make users’ systems less vulnerable to failure or damage from those dreaded software viruses and other, more pervasive threats. The fact that industry decision makers trekked all the way to Vail – not the worst place for a visit – to work together to develop and adopt real procedures for distributed systems reliability certainly impressed Yankee Group senior associate Michael Dortch – Most computer industry conferences are academic exercises, he said. The results of the conference will be published as lists of specific recommendations for users and other vendors, and will be circulated to all the major computer manufacturers for comment, modification and endorsement. We have to make multi-vendor distributed computer systems even more reliable than the public telephone system, and we cannot do this without co-operation, commented Datapoint’s Bruce Jones.