IBM Corp may be planning to phase out its AIX/ESA mainframe Unix (CI No 2,199), but yesterday the company announced enhancements to AIX/ESA Release 2, which is based on the Open Software Foundation’s OSF/1 1.1. The systems input-output storage capacity rises with support of the new 3995 Optical Library Dataserver, and the system now conforms to the X/Open Portability Guide release 4. AIX/ESA systems management is enhanced by providing a new command that improves VM guest operation, and tracing and error logging have been enhanced with additional network debugging capabilities. AIX/ESA communications are enhanced with TCP/IP support of an Escon channel connection between an ES/9000 mainframe and RS/6000. Two new checkpointing facilities improve accounting of resource utilisation and reduce recovery time in the event of a process failure, allowing for the recording of resource utilisation as the application executes. It starts shipping on July 2.
