Tandem Computers Inc has gathered the latest raft of open systems application programming interfaces and middleware it has collected for the Unix personality running atop its proprietary NonStop Kernel operating system and called the bundle OSS, Open Systems Services. This, plus other extensions not in the initial release, have been in beta test at massively parallel processing Himalaya sites for some time (CI No 2,590). Tandem’s Tuxedo transaction processing implementation, NonStop Tuxedo, will be generally available by mid-year as part of Open Systems Services. In conjunction with Novell Inc, Tandem has integrated Tuxedo application programming interfaces with its NonStop Transaction Services/MP environment for Himalayas, and promises support for a range of third party Tuxedo application development tools later in the year. Also new is X500 messaging, Internet Packet Exchange/Sequential Packet Exchange and support for Network File System, CA-UniCenter and most XPG4 application programming interfaces on what is now a Posix.1 and .2-compliant Open Systems Services shell and file system. Full XPG4 compatibility is promised this year – XPG4 version 2, Unix 95, and TxRPC, transactional Remote Procedure Call, support is due in 1996, though Tandem will not be changing the NonStop name, it says. Distributed Computing Environment and parallel CICS, also part of Tandem’s open systems services strategy, are missing from this announcement, though Distributed Computing Environment is already at beta sites under an early access Open Systems Services release and is promised for later in the year. Tandem says applications – which could be written on Unix workstations and debugged using its tools – can be designed to use Open Systems Services and NonStop Kernel services. The shell provides an interface for invoking commands and applications from the Unix-type personality or from its legacy Guardian environment. NonStop Kernel is the microkernel implementation of Guardian. NonStop SQL/MP database applications already embedded with SQL statements can be transferred to Open Systems Services without rewriting the SQL code, the company claims. An unmodified implementation of Tandem’s NonStop UX System V.4 Unix on the parallel Himalayas is dismissed for the time being because Unix is not message-based and still uses shared-memory techniques, the company says. Meantime, unable to contain itself, we’re still looking at other operating systems was the first thing Tandem had to say to us last week, although it still would not, at least officially, utter the words Windows NT until yesterday (see front). Open Systems Services development versions, including a C compiler for application design or conversion is from $950 on K2000 Himalayas to $2,200 on K20000s. It runs under NonStop Kernel 2.0 (D30) or better. The Open Systems Services run-time system, without the C code generator and ability to compile new source code is from $650 to $1,100. NonStop Tuxedo will cost from $32,000 on K2000s and $66,700 for the K20000s.
