Intelligence gathered by the IBM Corp watchers suggest a busy autumn in the mainframe market, kicking off with IBM itself launching the 9672 R11 to R61 models, one to six-way Parallel Transaction Servers that will operate in stand-alone mode to support DOS/VSE, VM/ESA and possibly AIX. DOS/VSE is currently limited to two-way support so IBM has either undertaken a major rewrite, or for those users that want more than two-way support, the option will be to run it under VM. The machine is expected to support any operating system announced since September 5 1990, thereby making it very attractive to those users that do not have leading edge technology. An added extra looks to be a revised Sysplex licensing charge, a cut-down version that will appeal to the cost-conscious VM community. The Parallel Transaction Server – in reality of course it is pretty clearly simply a one-to-six way 9221, but the new name sounds much hotter and sexier – will be a high-volume product with keen price-performance and deliver about 12 MIPS per engine, and the launch is hopefully being compared with the launch of the E-series as the 4341 and 4331 and caused a radical market shake-up and put paid to one or two greedy and badly-run leasing companies – not to mention a significant number of Lloyd’s of London Names that had unwisely underwritten residual values on older machines. Some believe the new machine could re-establish IBM’s reputation as a serious mid-range mainframe manufacturer. Two days later, Amdahl will announce Models 3 and 5 of the 6395E disk subsystem, already available as the high-performance Model 9, to ship very soon after announcement. One week after the IBM launch, EMC Corp is expected to announce a Symmetrix Disaster Recovery Feature as microcode. In theory, it should offer some freedom from the tyranny of IBM’s Data Facility/System-Managed Storage. In mid-October, Hitachi Data Systems Inc and Comparex Informationssysteme AG announce their RAID devices based on 3.5 disks. On October 25, a major announcement on the monolithic mainframes is seen: some see either a top-end 12-way or a wind-up of the clock on all current models, others see a dramatic reduction in memory prices. Still others see an equally dramatic reduction in software pricing, fulfilling Lou Gerstner’s undertaking to do so. A twiddling of Escon is also expected. Meantime on October 4, an AS/400 announcement is inked in, likely including disk enhancements, plus news that OS/400 3.1, due in the fourth quarter will ship on time – but won’t work properly, and OS/400 4 will be previewed as the first release written to run on PowerPC AS/400s, something that 3.1 was meant to be.
