IBM Corp has given up on salvaging anything from this year’s fourth quarter, so yesterday’s announcement was not the neck or nothing blitz expected, and none of the new processors ships until March, more or less ensuring that 1991 goes down in the history as the first year since the exhausted aftermath of World War II in 1946 that the company has seen a year-on-year fall in turnover. Nevertheless, the announcement saw the launch of 100 new products, seven new mainframe processors, new models of the 3390 disk and two new disk families, a tentative and unconvincing first pass at native Unix on the mainframe, and a whole new layer of confusion in the area of AD/Cycle and SystemView. Probably the hottest property, and one not widely forecast, is the 9340 5.25 disk drive, which comes in 1Gb and 1.5Gb versions, two in module, supported by all the mainframe operating systems from VSE up. The drive has a fast 11mS access time, latency of 5.6mS and transfer rate of 4.4M bytes per second, against 4.2Mbytes per second for the 3390, over which it has a 2.5:1 weight advantage for a given capacity. Maximum capacity per rack is 48Gb, all of which would imply horrible residuals on old 3390s and little market for the new 3390s for users that do not already have some – if it weren’t for the fact that the 3390 Model 3s appear to offer a price of about $11,000 per Gigabyte, where the new ones are around $14,000 per Gigabyte. IBM is touting the 9340 only for air-cooled and smaller water-cooled machine, but will hardly refuse to sell them to top-end users; they ship in the first quarter of next year, where the 34Gb 3390s are available this month. IBM’s first pass at a disk array, already announced as part of the company’s Supercomputing System Extensions but with an RS/6000 controller (CI No 1,557), now appears as the 9750 for the 390s, but with a HIPPI interface; it is only really for scientific applications and is supported by Fortran. On the new 3390 disk drives, which store 34Gb, IBM is offering 50% more capacity for 20% higher price – but going to the drive requires only minimal changes to MVS and VM. The new processors are the 9121-490, 570 and 610, all of which have a system controller, a feature not offered on the original dual 9121s, the 440 and 480. The four new water cooled machines are the 520 uniprocessor, 640 dyadic, 660 two-way multiprocessor and 740 triadic. On the native mainframe Unix, AIX/ESA, IBM is studiously vague, saying that there will be staging releases in the second quarter of next year, with availability on the baby 9221 machines – 9370 replace ments – in the third quarter. The 3390-3 disk drives appear to be about the only major items in the announcement that are immediately available, which suggests that IBM has decided to try to get all its financial bad news out of the way in 1991 in what it knows is going to be a truly awful year whatever it does, and start 1992 with a clean slate in the hope that it can turn in a much better performance – although little of the new stuff will be shipped in first quarter.
