IBM’s new System/390 architecture offers capabilities that currently available system software is unable to exploit, many software developers believe, and they reckon that IBM must have some more surprises up its sleeves – the ESA/390 announcement on September 5 revealed only the tip of the iceberg of what is to come, they reckon. According to Computerwoche, the September announcements disappointed many of IBM fans, who felt cheated at being deprived of the structure specifications of the AD/Cycle information model. Dieter Wollsclger, head of applications architecture at IBM Deutschland GmbH, Stuttgart, has been contributing to the rumour mill – at the German Unix User Group conference he unofficially promised an AIX version of the CICS transaction monitor as well as a DB2-compatible relational database management system for IBM’s AIX Unix-alike. Saverio Merlo, vice-president of marketing for Boole & Babbage Europe, says there is a lot more to the new System/390 architecture than a bigger machine. IBM, he says, is more concerned with increasing its share of the transaction processing market, and Escon – Enterprise Systems Connection – architecture will enable IBM to improve the performance of its multi-processor systems a problem which Tandem Computers Inc has already solved. The issue of the compatibility of the software with the new hardware is yet to be addressed – Merlo reckons new versions of IMS/DC and CICS can be expected. And Jeffrey Buzon, senior vice-president of BGS Systems, Waltham, Massachusetts, has been speculating as to the sort of products that IBM could soon be announcing to support the System/390 architecture – he reckons IBM may capitalise on shared expanded storage, but this would reduce the value of the existing 3090 systems, which is why IBM is holding off on this at present – got to keep IBM Credit’s book clean. He says that we will soon be seeing all IBM computers using the same Common Clock – invaluable for a common storage expansion. Buzon also thinks that IBM will make changes to disk recording – Count Key Data Format is, he says, too complex, and it would be a bad move to return to fixed block architecture. Like many, he is impatiently awaiting the redundant array of inexpensive disks that IBM has been working on in San Jose.
