Fundamental Software, a Fremont, California supplier of specialized software that allows PC servers to run IBM’s mainframe operating systems, says it has a product that will give low-end IBM mainframe customers options that they haven’t yet been offered. Fundamental’s product, called FlexES (formerly known as Open370), isn’t an IBM mainframe emulation environment like those that offer emulation for PC or AS/400 programs in Unix environments. What FlexES does is emulate IBM’s mainframe hardware on PC servers so that the real MVS, VM and VSE licenses from IBM run on that that platform. Once FlexES is installed on a Dell, Data General or Sequent NumaQ server (running SCO Unix on the Dell and DG’s and Sequent’s respective Unixes on their boxes), a portion of the processing power of the Unix system not dedicated to the S/370 workload can be employed by the Unix environment to do other work. While IBM has offered PC-370 combos since the days of the PC-AT back in the early 1980s, Big Blue has never put its heart into the idea, mainly because it never stood to make much money selling low-cost mainframe software licenses. Big Blue has all but conceded will eventually move to AS/400, Unix or NT servers sometime between now and the end of the millennium. Other vendors are seeking to take advantage of IBM’s relatively high priced hardware costs at the low end of the mainframe market. The smallest Multiprise servers, for instance, sell for $8,000 or more per MIPS because IBM charges a lot for the base frame; big 9672s are selling for $4,500 to $5,000 per MIPS. Small wonder IBM hasn’t sold many Multiprise boxes, especially when software licensing fees for the machines can easily come to tens of thousands of dollars per year. Even with IBM’s recently announced S/390 Integrated Server that starts shipping in a month and has a specialized VLSI chip that emulates the S/390 instruction set, the price of a base machine can easily go to $100,000 with full software license purchases (IBM doesn’t rent software on the box.) That buys an awful of money for a tiny mainframe, and it buys an awful lot of PC hardware. You don’t have to tell Carl Ross, president and CEO of Fundamental that. It’s part of his sales pitch to tell customers that they can get his software and PC hardware for $2,000 a MIPS rather than pay IBM’s hardware prices. Ross says that a Dell 2300 server with a two Pentium II processors offers between 6 and 8 MIPS of power running FlexES (one CPU is used as the system assist processor to connect the emulated S370 processor to mainframe peripheral cards, which Fundamental designs and builds itself and which is, oddly enough, the hard part in all this). An eight-way Sequent NumaQ server has around 50 MIPS of power. No matter how much MIPS customers squeeze out of their PC servers, they pay for their software based on those MIPS, just like real IBM mainframe customers, under an agreement between Fundamental and IBM. Ross says he doesn’t hammer that cheap MIPS message too hard, though, since his small private company depends on IBM’s operating system support to survive. It’s not so much cheap MIPS, says Ross. A Sequent box running FlexES and a Multiprise aren’t orders of magnitude different in price, but they are different in the flexibility they provide. As for IBM, Ross says his argument for its cooperation was simple. We ensured IBM that we would protect its intellectual property rights and that it would profits when we sold FlexES. To some extent we are competing, but we rarely run into IBM. When we can do a complete machine at $20,000 and IBM needs $50,000 or $100,000, we get the job. Thus far, Fundamental has 50 clients, many of whom were early adopters of the FlexES technology and who got enterprise-wide licenses on the cheap. While the FlexES product is appropriate for most vintage 4300, 3080, 9370 and 9221 customers, FlexES does not support ESCON channels or expanded memory, which is a caching technology used on mainframes that allows them to use chunks of memory beyond the mainframe’s 2 gigabyte main memory block to store frequently accessed data and thereby speed up overall system performance. (It works like L2 cache in today’s RISC designs and pre-dates it, in fact.) Now that the company has received some attention with its $2,000 per MIPS deal, Fundamental is looking at other opportunities for its product. The company is already testing its product under the Red Hat and Slackware implementations of Linux. Ross says that his developers like Red Hat, but that there are a couple of things it would have to change for it to be a commercial product. The company is using Linux for laptops and demos, however, since it is easier to deal with than SCO. Fundamental is, of course, thinking about NT as well. We don’t really care what operating system we run under, says Ross. But he hasn’t moved to NT yet for good reason. Bill Gates saw our product at a trade show and told us to wait for NT 5.0. Who are we to argue with Bill? As it stands, the Fundamental hasn’t started an NT port yet, but says there is no technical reason why it couldn’t be done.
