Making what it claims is its most strategic announcement since the VAX itself, DEC has thrown itself into the transaction processing market with a number of new offerings and upgrades. Under the umbrella of a new programme entitled DECtp, the company has released Version 3 of its existing VAX Application Control & Management System, ACMS, transaction processing monitor, to offer new data integrity and security features, together with a hot queue transaction storage feature, designed to boost performance. To cater for users who prefer a more traditional approach – specifically the financial sector – the company has also introduced Version 1 of its DECintact transaction processing monitor, based on the Intact product from Advanced Systems Concepts (CI No 971). Both products run across the range of DEC’s VAX processors. Also announced under the Distributed Data Transaction Processing Architecture, DDTA, label was Version 3 of the VAX Rdb relational database management system, which the company claims offers a fivefold performance increase over existing versions with support for 50Gb of data; Version 4 of the VAX DBMS software, which includes the integration of Version 2 of VAX SQL; DEClink software, to give users access to IBM databases; Version 2 of the company’s VAX Rally applications generator; and Version 4 of the VAX CDD Plus Common Data Dictionary. DEC claims that the new offerings will up the company’s transaction processing rate to around 9m transactions per day, and it hopes to expand its current 5% share of the market to between 10% to 15% by 1991. Its decision to opt for the Credit/Debit set of benchmarks renders competition comparisons difficult; quoted transactions per second for the ACMS and Rdb range from 5tps for the VAX 3600 to 20tps on the 8820, with the DECintact notching up 6tps on the MicroVAX 3600 through to 53tps on two combined VAX 8810s. The VAX ACMS is priced between UKP3,800 and UKP56,612, and is available immediately, as is the DECintact, which has a price range from UKP5,290 to UKP77,316.
