Finally realising its ambition to offer a comprehensive operating environment to the IBM MVS mainframe world, Amdahl Corp yesterday answered IBM’s AD/Cycle with Huron, a development and production environment that runs under MVS – a UTS Unix version is coming that will also run on workstations. In contrast to AD/Cycle, Huron, 10 years in the making, is a production as well as a development environment and appears to have been developed around the data dictionary rather than having that crucial element added as an afterthought. Amdahl calls its data dictionary MetaStor, and it integrates data about data, data tables and Huron, all identified as objects. The MetaStor supports synchronous read-write access to heterogenous distributed data in DB2, IDMS, IMS, VSAM and Model 204. Huron also includes its own relational database and all activities that occur in Huron are by definition transactions – and all transactions obey a two-phase commit protocol. The product clearly addresses the growing disenchantment with IBM’s software pricing strategy, and seems to offer an escape route for MVS users to open systems. The product has been in beta test for some time – the release is Huron 1.16 – and the first named customer is American Express Travel Related Services Co Inc, which waxes lyrical about the speed of applications development and the resouces reauired. Prices for Huron range from UKP387,454 to UKP1.0m, and it is available at once.
