Nili Young, the Meta Group’s vice-president and director of mid-range systems strategies, says it is time that users stopped bidding for systems and started bidding for applications. As things stand, users have two choices. They can bring their costs down by optimising applications, or they can pay the freight costs of CPUs. The first option may include a personal computer for file services, an AS/400 for applications, an intelligent wiring hub for communications, an RS/6000 or Sun workstation for compute services and a personal computer file server sitting off the network. That, says Ms Young, is the less expensive of the two choices, but is a major headache in terms of systems management and integrity. The alternative may be a VAX 6500 supporting the same applications but offering a single operating environment with continuous availability. The rub is in the price, UKP50,000 for a 50-user department versus UKP600,000 for the availability of one environment, although it won’t yield the highest performance necessarily. Ms Young suggests that users exercise a great deal of caution when looking at benchmarks since they often bear no relation to their particular requirements. Dollars per MIPS and dollars per transaction are meaningless unless they are directly related to a user’s application needs, and there is lot more to transaction processing then mere debit and credit. If users are to exploit distributed heterogeneous environments, then standards must evolve, but again, she warns of creative marketing. Users need very few standards to save money, and they consist generally of X400 for sending messages; OSI for communications; FTAM for file transfer; and something for managing the network which remains a problem since OSI standards have yet to evolve. However, vendors have a different set of requirements. They need third parties to write to their standards and they require additional standards to win government contracts. Accordingly, they are prone to hype and two examples, according to Ms Young, are DEC’s Network Application System and Bull’s Distributed Computing Model.
Platters that wobble
It was Ms Young that researched Meta’s revelation that IBM has an ongoing problem with its 9335 and 9332 disk drives, and IBM’s insistence that it has resolved the vibration problem which may develop after extensive use, carries little weight with her. She stands by her conclusion that users ought to avoid installing these disks and strongly recommends either the 9336 or alternative offerings from the plug compatible manufacturers. Her research indicates that the 9335 has a mean time between failure rate of 20,000 hours, and she calculates that to mean that the 9335 is down once a month. Of the 10,000 users who may be affected by this problem, Ms Young believes that IBM has contacted only 6,000. She says that the design problem is largely due to arcane technology like the 14 platters which wobble when they reach a certain speed. But IBM’s problems are compounded by a shortage of replacement drives, emaking it difficult to issue a recall, and Ms Young claims that IBM has still to inform its very largest US customers of 9335 design-faults. For its part, IBM says that the 9335 continues to meet expectations and performance standards, and there is no reason not to invest.
