IBM Corp duly tore up its mainframe price list yesterday for the US and most other markets – calling the new approach Customer Value Pricing, and announced that all newly shipped ES/9000s and upgrades would come with a Satisfaction Guarantee as it added 10 new ES/9021 water-cooled mainframe models, including the long-awaited eight-processor machine, and eight new air-cooled 9121s – numbers and configurations as given in CI No 2,100. All the new water-cooled machines are available next month apart from the 982 eight-way, which is available both new build and as an upgrade from the 820, 860 and 900 this month. The air-cooled 511 and 611 are available now, the others in May. The The clock on the 9021s is speeded up to 7.1nS and the 9121s have an 11nS clock. IBM claims that the uniprocessor is rated at 60 MIPS, and that the new eight-way delivers 70% more power than the existing six-way 9021-900. The main new feature is a system-wide data compression hardware assist that enables data to be handled in compressed form throughout the machine – compression is between two and three to one, but the software to exploit it will not be available until the end of the year. More bad news is that there are two more software pricing groups – Model Group 90 for the seven-way, Group 100 for the eight-way. The second level high-speed buffer on the new models is increased to 2Mb and there is a second input-ouput processor on models with more than 64 channels. There are also new CICS security features to prevent one file accidentally overwriting another. The new machines also offer improved high-speed Sysplex clustering, including the ability to combine existing machines with the forthcoming parallel 390s when they arrive. Functional enhancements for the air-cooled models include Escon Multiple Image Facility and Asynchronous Pageout Facility, both of which were previously available only on water-cooled systems. There is a statement of direction on new 9221s for next year, and the company is highlighting the forthcoming MVS Open Edition, which will be Posix-compliant and will run on all MVS/ESA capable machines. The new machines should ensure that IBM is able to report healthier figures for the second quarter – and perhaps the end of the first quarter, before the market goes into the summer doldrums. Whether the impetus will be sustained into the fourth quarter of 1993 is another matter.
