Amdahl Corp yesterday announced UTS Release 4, claiming it to be the world’s first commercial Unix System V.4.1ES-based system according Ken Gorf, director, Open Systems, Europe. It runs on Amdahl’s 5890, 5990, 5995A and 5995M mainframes; features asynchronous disk and tape input-output; and a fair-share scheduler that divides user workloads into groups, each with their own proportion of processor capacity. It comes with OSF/Motif 1.1, Open Look 4 and X Window System 11.4 user interfaces and supports the Tuxedo 4.2 transaction processing system. It uses TCP/IP for data exchange over Ethernet, Hyp-erChannel and FDDI networks and can communicate over an SNA network with applications running under MVS using the LU 6.2 protocol. It also conforms to the US and UK Government Open Systems Interconnection Profiles and the Open Network Computing specifications for a variety of protocols. In addition, it complies with the X/Open Portability Guide 3, IEEE Posix 1003.1, Unix System V Interface Definition 3 and ANSI C specification. It will be available to limited customers in the first quarter of 1993; general availability will follow improvements to networking capability through Amdahl 4655 front-end processors, and added support for Enterprise Systems Connection architecture and the Open Systems Expansion Feature of Amdahl’s 6390-3 disk drives. Users of the current UTS 2.1 – based on System V.3.1 can run their existing applications under UTS 4, with a view to fine-tuning them later – or implement instant modifications with migration tools. There is no charge for upgrading binary licences to UTS 4 and users can run versions 2.1 and 4 for 90 days, for no additional fees, when migrating. Initial licence fees range from $20,000 to $45,000 depending on processor size. Monthly licence fees range from $4,000 to $30,000.
