DEC chose fault tolerance as the basis of its first major systems launch of the 1990s, stressing the increasing importance of mission critical computing for the transaction processing market – forecast to contribute some $2,000m to DEC’s revenues this year – DEC quoted Gartner Group figures that say that fault tolerance is now needed in 65% of all transaction processing systems. The new VAXft 3000 Model 310 is DEC’s first general purpose fault-tolerant system, and consists of two fully mirrored component sets in separate cabinets with high-speed interconnections. Each has a double CMOS VAX CPU, and redundant memory, disks, communications controllers, power supply and backplane. The machines are intended inter alia to be used to front-end VAXclusters for incremental fault-tolerance. The system is supported by a new release of VMS – version 5.4 which embeds volume shadowing and the two-phase commit protocol into the operating system with the addition of the DECdtm distributed transaction processing manager. Other new software includes new version of DEC’s transaction processing monitors ACMS and DECintact, and support for two phase commit for the Rdb and DBMS databases. Robert Glorioso, DEC vice-president of business information systems, said that DEC had not taken the costly niche approach of specialist companies such as Tandem and Stratus, but had worked to combine fault-tolerant elements with conventional VAXes and high availability clusters, enabling the existing 6,500 VAX applications to take advantage of fault tolerance transparently. Software houses supporting the launch included Cognos Inc with the Powerhouse language; Information Builders, Focus; Software AG with Natural; Logica with its Fastwire financial message switching software. But while DEC was calling VMS an industry standard operating system, it is not yet offering an Ultrix version of the software, although executives promised that it would be available within a year. Prices for the nine transactions-per-second system start at some $200,000, with first shipments in June. DEC also introduced a new tape drive and two new disks offering the required levels of data integrity: the TF70 tape drive stores 296Mb, transfer speeds of 125Kbps and a DSSI interface, while the two RF31 Winchester disks have 310Mb storage with a 264-bit error correction code that transparently corrects errors of up to 120 erroneous bits. And it added three new software tools: DECtrace for gathering event-based data and performance information; RdbExpert, an artificial intelligence tool using DECtrace to help database administrators optimise database performance; DECscheduler for VMS, to automate repetitive production jobs.
