IBM Corp’s stand-alone 9672 R-series mainframes are expected on Tuesday (CI No 2,488) and we hear the machines will come with a bundled option where the price includes beat-the-price-rises 36 months of software licences. The six models in the 9672 R line are the Parallel Enterprise Server models R11 to R61. They use the same processors as the latest 9221s, which means they are probably no faster than the E series 9672s launched last spring. IBM says the one-way is about as powerful as the largest 3081, the two-way is about as big as the 3084 and the six-way is about equivalent to a 3090-300J. The 9672-Rs will support all XA and ESA versions of the operating system, not just the current releases. They will support all peripherals, including old disks and tapes, supported by those releases and will be available immediately. In second quarter 1995, a new MVS release, V5R2, is due, which for some bizarre reason requires the user to buy one of those coupling facilities for the Parallel Sysplex configuration; IBM is still being unspecific about DB2 for all this kit. The only benefit of the new release is that it brings usage-based software pricing. IBM will also announce a new VSE/ESA, Version 2, which has a feature called the TurboDispatcher enabling it to run over more than two CPUs sounds like a master-slave configuration, but it means that VSE users won’t need VM to go beyond a single or dual CPU configuration. And Lanres will now be built into VSE as well. IBM plans to enhance Cobol and PL/I, and will make versions of AdDstar Distributed Storage Manager and TCP/IP networking facilities available for VSE. There will be a new release of VM, called VM OpenEdition, which follows the April version of MVS in its support of DCE and Posix. IBM is cutting software prices in the Model Groups 18 to 31, and that will not only make it less expensive to pay monthly fees for 9672s (which will be priced on a system, not on the individual CPU level), but also for old 3090s and 9221s. IBM says there are two markets for these machines: customers using pre-1990 mainframes and paying through the nose for maintenance and environmentals, and customers interested in a starter Parallel Sysplex system. Customers with 10 MIPS and less running VSE will be targetted with 9221s first; the 9672-Rs will be aimed at low-power MVS shops at first. IBM offers as an example a customer with a 3081K running MVS/XA: it would suggest they moved to a 9672-R21 since when the user bundles all the hardware, software, maintenance and service costs into an IBM Credit Corp lease and compare it to the cost of keeping and paying the electric and cooling bills for the 3081, he will come out ahead. IBM says this customer will get a 90% performance boost and cut costs per month by 15%. Let’s try a 4381-22R customer running VSE-SP. IBM moves them to a 9221-130, gives them all new software, and when you look at the cost over three years on IBM Credit lease), the customer gets a 15% increase in power and cuts his monthly costs by 15%.
