By Timothy Prickett Morgan
In concert with IBM’s shipment on Friday of its OS/390 2.7 release of its flagship operating system for mainframes, Candle Corporation, a longtime IBM mainframe partner and developer of system monitoring and control programs for mainframes and open systems, announced support for OS/390 2.7 as well as new pricing terms for its various OS/390 products that reflect IBM’s own pricing for OS/390. Candle, which claims that it hasn’t raised pricing for products in the OS/390 market for four years, is, like IBM, trying to find a more equitable way to charge for software usage that doesn’t adversely affect the top and bottom line. The new Candle pricing options follow IBM’s lead.
Last September, IBM revamped S/390 pricing to include three new pseudo-usage based pricing options for S/390 software products with the goal of giving average high-end mainframe customers a 20% price/performance boost – meaning a 20% reduction in prices – on a suite of OS/390 programs. The first was parallel sysplex capacity pricing, which offered discounts to customers with clustered or single S/390 or compatible mainframes with 1,000 or more total MIPS. For these customers, IBM cut software prices by 25%for each additional MIPS over 1,000 if they moved to the most recent release of OS/390.
The second usage-based pricing model introduced in September was S/390 Usage Pricing (SUPC), which replaced the existing parallel sysplex Measured Usage License Charges (MULC) and capacity based pricing schemes IBM used for standalone mainframes for various middleware and database products. Specifically, SUPC applies to the DB2 and IMS databases, CICS and CICS Transaction Server transaction monitors, MQSeries middleware, and a number of DB2 administration tools. The tools to measure and monitor usage (and therefore figure out the monthly software bill to IBM) are very complex, which is why IBM made them available to OS/390 business partners who wanted to offer SUPC-alike pricing schemes.
The third pricing option announced for OS/390 products last September is called New Application Growth Environment pricing. Under this scheme, IBM is trying to keep customers from moving to Unix, NT or AS/400 platforms when they deploy modern applications like groupware or ERP suites. To that end, IBM’s mainframe division offers customers installing Lotus Domino, SAP R/3, BaanERP, Oracle Applications, PeopleSoft, Intelligent Miner, Net.Commerce or consolidated Unix or Windows NT print and file serving workloads up to a 75% price cut on OS/390 products used to support those workloads for the portion of the MIPS that is dedicated to these jobs and provided customers buy extra MIPS to cover these jobs.
The New Application pricing options, which obviously can cut the cost of a total S/390 setup by a substantial amount provided customers continue to grow, stay in effect so long as customers support that workload on a S/390, even as they upgrade that software and move to new IBM iron. As of January 1, customers can no longer pay one-time charges to buy OS/390 and related licenses except on the low-end P/390 or Integrated Server baby mainframes, which only have basic one-time charges. They can only rent it on a monthly basis.
To give customers the same price incentives to stay in the mainframe fold and to grow their workloads on S/390 mainframes, Candle Corp has announced a usage-based pricing scheme for its Omegamon II performance monitors for CICS, DBCTL, IMS and DB2 as well as for managing data sharing in a parallel sysplex environment, Candle Command Center. Like IBM, Candle did not announce the exact pricing details, but just said that it was following IBM’s lead.
Candle also says that it can support the Capacity Upgrade On Demand features IBM announced in January. The G5s now include a new set of microcode that allows customers to add processing power to their machines without having to take them offline. An S/390 multi-chip module (MCM) has six full S/390 CMOS chips, running at between 420 MHz and 500 MHz in the case of the G5s. S/390 servers can have one or two of these MCMs, and depending on how many IBM turns on, they can have from 1 to 10 active processors in those servers (two of the chips are used as either hot spares or I/O controllers). Capacity Upgrade on Demand, which allows for performance upgrades without having to take the machine down, only works on a machine that already has one or two MCMs installed and is using the same speed G5 engines. To move from a five-way server to a ten-way server requires the same old upgrade, but moving from a two-way to a three-way or from an eight-way to a ten-way just requires activation of the microcode.
Candle has also announced a points-based licensing option that allows customers who move from OS/390 to Unix or from Unix to Windows NT to apply the money that they have already spent on mainframe or Unix software and apply it to the Unix or NT Candle software that they will need on their new systems. Additionally, Candle says that customers can buy S/390 servers from IBM preconfigured with its Omegamon II performance monitors under IBM’s SystemPac bundling program. Specifically, IBM will install Omegamon II monitors for MVS, CICS, IMS, DBCTK, SMS and VTAM.
As was the case with every OS/390 and CICS TS release, Candle announced support on delivery day for IBM’s new OS/390 release. Candle says its monitors support the new CISC Transaction Server 1.3, and that a new Candle release in May or June will offer even tighter integration with CICS TS 1.3. Last Friday Candle also announced enhanced versions of its AF/Operator (now at version 250) operator console, which includes expanded support for parallel sysplex clusters and better control over normal OS/390 tasks. The Omegacenter Gateway (version 150), which is an automated problem resolution agent, also includes more support for parallel sysplex. The company’s AF/Remote console, which provides remote access to Omegacenter and various operating systems, has been ported from OS/2 to Windows NT with version 100.
