Groupe Bull SA has enhanced its GCOS 8 operating system for the DPS 8000 and DPS 9000 mainframes and is new describing the things as enterprise servers. The GCOS 8 systems are supported by a new range of products called Open Alliance, and they are claimed to provide a transparent interface with open systems. They enable GCOS 8s to interact with Bull’s open systems product family, IBM SNA networks and other vendors’ systems through the use of Open Systems Interconnection applications, while Unix and personal computer integration is provided by TCP/IP support. There are two types of Open 8 Network processors, the Open 8-CC and Open 8-AP. The first – essentially a DPX 2 Unix machine – is a communication controller that permits local and wide area network TCP/IP connections to GCOS, and also supports the development of co-operative GCOS 8-Unix applications. The Open 8-AP, based on the DPX 2300, is closely coupled to the GCOS 8 mainframe via high-speed channels, which is similar to IBM’s Unix-to-mainframe model. Bull is also introducing the Interel RFM/II relational database which provides a transaction processing interface to relational databases on the host system. Interel has existed as a relational database on GCOS 8 machines for two years, and Bull says that the integration of transaction processing elements means that it can be used in production environments as well as in decision support – an approach not dissimilar to what IBM has been trying to achieve with DB2, although some commentators suggest that very few installations are using DB2 for production.
