First Summit deliveries in the second quarter of next year, preceded by Foothill, a cut-down Sumit, for delivery in the third quarter of this year, and a blitz in the disk arena is the IBM scenario outlined by Marc Butlein, co-founder with Dale Kutnick of Meta Group Inc, Westport, Connecticut. Speaking at a conference organised by leaser ECS in Paris yesterday, Butlein suggested that Foothill would really be a large 3090 with more memory, faster channels and a new version of Enterprise Systems Architecture. It will offer 20% to 30% improvement in performance over the 3090 Js, and will likely be upgradable to Summit in the fourth quarter of next year – where it is unlikely that existing 3090s will be able to upgrade. For Summit, he sees a new architecture optimised for transaction processing, a minimum of 256Mb of main memory, channels running at up to 200Mbytes-per-second, a new input-output subsystem, complexes that will deliver over 1,000 MIPS, and a uniprocessor performance of about 42 MIPS. He reckons that 1 Summit MIPS will be worth 1.25 3090 MIPS by virtue of the additional memory and input-output features, so that the thing will cost $70,000 per throughput equivalent MIPS, equating to $90,000 per actual MIPS. He reckons that ESA will be essential to liberate the new functionality on Summit. On DB2, he sees an ESA version of the database management system in 1992, and a dedicated RISC-based DB2 processor in 1992 or 1993. He reckons that IBM, facing up to the fact that plug-compatible manufacturers have doubled their share of the MVS mainframe market to 24% since 1984 and that IBM is no longer seen as the clear market leader, will respond by rapid innovation on the disk drive front, going to clustered 5.25 disks storing 60Gb to 75Gb per subystem and initially attaching to the 3990. He sees these hitting the market in the second half of 1991 at $12 to $15 per megabyte, and leading to substantial improvement in DB2 performance. And for non-time-critical storage, he looks for write-once optical drives installed in a jukebox for image applications, for delivery in the fourth quarter of 1992, to be accompanied by read-write mass storage optical disk subsystems storing 400Gb to 600Gb and costing $2 per Mb. As for the 4391, he looks for that to be launched in June or July, air-cooled despite using 3090 Thermal Conduction Modules, coming with expanded storage, PR/SM, fibre optic channels and three models at 8 MIPS, 15 MIPS and 22 MIPS, and costing $60,000 to $70,000 per MIPS.
