This week at its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, Amdahl Corp demonstrated its mainframe support for IBM’s new ESA/370 architecture and MVS/ESA operating system on the largest model in its 5890 Series of mainframes, the 600E multiprocessor. The presentation, both live and via Amdahl’s private television network, will be repeated during the week for customers. The initial demonstration was done on a 5890 to deflect scepticism about Amdahl’s commitment to that range, and because the company hopes that its larger 5890 customer base will take up Enterprise System Architecture before moving up to the 5990 range. However, a similar event using a processor from the company’s 5990 Series is scheduled for October. Yesterday’s demonstration included the running of standard TSO/E and DB2 production workloads under MVS/ESA. According to David Brewer, Amdahl vice-president of processor products, the system performed perfectly and again illustrated Amdahl’s effectiveness in adapting its existing mainframes to new architecture, something which IBM does not do. Brewer’s development team is particularly proud of the fact that every element of the ESA/370 principles of operation is being incorporated as standard on all of Amdahl’s 5890E and 5990 models, while on competitive systems, such as IBM’s 3090E, certain features are presently included only on the largest and newest mainframes in the product line. Such features in Amdahl’s implementation include the Private Space Facility, PSF, which enables new data spaces to exist in harmony with older architectural features, and the Access Register Translation Lookaside Buffer which is significantly larger than IBM’s and should improve performance by reducing the machine time required to do address translation. MVS/ESA and VM/XA under MDF Furthermore, the demonstration was conducted using Amdahl’s Multiple Domain Feature to run both MVS/ESA and VM/XA workloads simultaneously on the same mainframe. Under PR/SM, IBM’s partitioning system similar to MDF, it is recommended that the two are not mixed in a production environment. The first new 5890Es with ESA/370 capabilities will be delivered in September with the first 5990s following in the fourth quarter. Updates of machines already in the field will be made at no charge to customers from the fourth quarter for the 5890Es and in January for the 5990s. Following the release of IBM’s architectural specifications in mid-June of last year, Enterprise System Architecture is beginning to be viewed by many as the data processing industry standard for the 1990s, Amdahl believes. Certainly Amdahl is staking its development into the 1990s on the exploitation of this Architecture. It believes that Enterprise System Architecture will really begin to take off after 1991 when it forecasts that ESA versions of both CICS and DB2 will be available. Another part of Amdahl’s future, of course, lies with its UTS implementation of Unix for mainframes which it claims has 40% of all Unix mainframe licences throughout the world, and produced 15% of corporate revenue in 1988, implying a very substantial $300m business this year. Despite a predicted shakeout in the mainframe market in the near future Amdahl is confident about its position in the market because of its focus on data management. For example, its 6100 storage processor which was launched in June is now shipping in volume and there is a backlog of orders for it. In communications, Amdahl is working towards both SNA compatible products and, outside the IBM arena, it is catering for the X25 protocol. Finally, Amdahl believes that its partnership with Fujitsu will keep it technologically advanced, while its financial stability promises further acquisitions in unspecified sectors. Managing director of Amdahl (UK) Doug Smith’s parting shot was that the future of the company will not be driven by market hype.
