By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Last week, IBM Corp added support for the HP-UX 11.0 release of Unix to its TXSeries version 4.2 of transaction monitoring software. TXSeries is an amalgam of the transaction monitoring software developed by IBM’s CICS mainframe group and Transarc’s Encina. IBM bought Transarc years ago and created an open systems implementation of CICS that is based heavily on the Encina transaction monitor for Unix. This software has subsequently been enhanced with real CICS functionality and was ported from AIX to Solaris and Windows NT. In a very real sense, HP-UX 11.0 gets a bit of credibility for high-volume transaction processing now that it has support for TXSeries, although a prior release of TXSeries was available for HP-UX 10.2.
Many large corporations who want to deploy Unix applications on 64-bit hardware but who nonetheless want to leverage their CICS skills – say all the world’s financial institutions just for starters – have been given only two choice of platforms up until now: IBM’s 64-bit RS/6000s or Sun’s 64-bit Ultra Enterprise Sparcs. But with TXSeries finally supported on HP-UX 11.0, they can deploy CICS-style OLTP applications on Hewlett-Packard’s latest 64-bit HP 9000 Unix boxes. The Windows NT support of TXSeries is appropriate for moderate OLTP workloads, and the TXSeries on IBM’s S/390s is for very big jobs and for customers who want the extra reliability that IBM’s 9672s offer and are willing to pay lots of extra money for it.
The TXSeries software, which was initially announced in January 1998 for AIX, includes two backend internet gateways, DE-Light and CICS Transaction Gateway. It also has hooks for CGI, RPC, Corba IIOP and Java servlets and applets via both DE-Light and the CICS gateway. On HP servers, TXSeries 4.2, as the latest release is called on all midrange platforms, requires HP-UX 11.0 with PHCO patches number 17556 and 18533. It also requires DCE Base Services, which is part of HP-UX; DCE Cell Directory Service, DCE Security Service and the CoreAdmin, CoreTools and KT-Tools for HP-UX are optional components but strongly recommended. The HP ANSI C compiler as well as Micro Focus Cobol for HP-UX will work with TXSeries, as will the HP-UX versions of DB2, Oracle. Informix and Sybase databases and IBM’s MQSeries queuing middleware. TXSeries 4.2 will not work with HP-UX 10.2. TXSeries 4.2 for HP-UX 11.0 costs $30,275 per server with a $75 per user charge, with upgrades from prior HP-compatible CICS or Encina transaction monitors costs $28,638 per server plus $38 per user.
