There is a growing groundswell of opinion that IBM Corp’s mainframe users will end up migrating to multiprocessing or massively parallel Unix, either with IBM or someone like Hewlett-Packard Co – and the biggest deterrent has been that many of the most important users have vast batch jobs that are not well served by such systems. It is the reason that IBM Corp is losing many of its biggest users to Hitachi Ltd’s Skyline, because it has failed to satisfy those users that its own CMOS Parallel Sysplex configurations can handle very big batch jobs. Now, reports our sister publication, Unigram.X, Bull HN Information Systems Inc’s Billerica, Massachusetts-based UniKix Technologies Inc is offering a Parallel Processing Facility for running batch processes on Unix symmetric multiprocessing and massively parallel servers. UniKix, famous for its compatible version of IBM’s CICS mainframe transaction processing manager that runs under Unix – and was belatedly copied by IBM, is hoping its system will give mainframe users back their batch window, when vast jobs such as overnight updating the current accounts with all a bank’s teller machine transactions must be done. UniKix says Parallel Processing Facility enables batch jobs to be spread across as many as 64 processors and works with its Extended Batch Management system for Unix. It’s not clear whether this will be fast enough to solve the problem for really big users, but prices go from $12,000 depending on CPU configuration. Parallel Processing Facility will be available from September for a new 5.0 release of the UniKix transaction monitor. UniKix has been integrated for use with Computer Associates International Inc’s CA-Unicenter suite; the work will be announced at the CA World event which starts on August 25 in New Orleans.
