But most of the promise of Wolfpack remains just that - a promise. According to Microsoft, most users are content with the simple failover and availability features the company already offers. The software giant denies it has welshed on any of its promises. The first stage is availability, Hassall says, and the second is scalability. Hassall says clustering does not necessarily mean linear scalability.
Scalability depends on the hardware and having cluster-aware applications.
A lot of things have to happen to deliver scalable clusters. Customers will have to wait some time. Another hotly hyped clustering technology is Red Hat's Extreme Linux Version 1.0. Extreme Linux runs on a variety of hardware boxes and can, in theory, link an unlimited number of CPUs. The combination of Red Hat's Linux and Beowulf clustering, while promising, is more hype than reality.