The announcement of IBM Corp’s new Systems Technology & Architecture Division caused a few groans in the office. Some people remembered Systems Application Architecture, IBM’s last big effort to produce consistent user and software interfaces across its mainframe, mid-range and PS/2 personal computers. Born in March 1987, It was grandiose, highly ambitious and… not the kind of thing that nice people mention any more. SAA, like an old soldier, did not so much die, as merely fade away. Whereas SAA confined its ambitions to software, this time around IBM is attempting to rationalise both software and hardware development. The new division is purely involved in hardware, it is true, but back in May, IBM announced its ‘Workplace with everything’ strategy, designed to introduce a common software base across its entire range of machines. The two developments go hand-in-hand. So will the Workplace and Systems Technology & Architecture strategies suffer the same ignoble fate as SAA? Probably not. They are bottom-up technology efforts, rather than a desperate bid to paper over the cracks. There was always something that looked rather cosmetic about SAA: fundamentally different systems given a lick of paint and a sprinkling of new applications programming interfaces to try and make them look the same; developers in different divisions forced to obey design rules and goals that really didn’t suit their machines’ capabilities. People paying lip-service. Where the SAA edifice appeared to be little more than wish-ware when first announced, the Workplace and Systems Technology & Architecture announcements look like more practical efforts to formalise work that has been going on for some time.

Only one wheel

Most importantly, it seems that IBM is taking care to ensure that the strategy actually helps those designing and building machines, rather than burdening them. The goal? To ensure that as far as possible IBM invents only one wheel. The new System Technology & Architecture Division will have 1,200 people on the payroll, led by Phil Hester, previously vice-president of systems and technology at the RS/6000 Division. However only a few of these (probably less than 100) will actually move to the Division’s Austin headquarters. The vast majority will stay exactly where they are, designing processors or subsystems in the ES/9000 (Large Scale Computing), RS/6000 or AS/400 division. The result? A substantial population of workers in these units who suddenly, are reporting to the central technology division, instead of their traditional bosses. That might cause some friction, if it weren’t for the fact that the chief bosses themselves have been transported to the new set-up. The Division is divided into three parts. The vast majority of the staff will be reporting back to the section charged with consolidating processor and memory subsystems. This office is headed by Larry Tarnow, previously head of AS/400 systems hardware development and now vice-president of Microprocessor Development. Tarnow gets control of IBM’s presence in the Somerset PowerPC design centre and AS/400 processor design (again PowerPC-based). He also finds himself holding the reins of the System 390 CMOS processor development. The second and much smaller part is the architectural standards office, with Richard Baum at the helm, plucked from the Large Scale Computing division, where he was IBM Fellow and assistant general manager. Baum becomes vice-president of Systems Architecture & Performance. His remit is to define architectural standards for all IBM server systems. So can we expect Baum’s burly henchman, clad in sharp suits and dark glasses to go bursting into IBM departments brandishing sheafs of paper and yelling FREEZE! From now on EVERYBODY uses 4.5 disk drives? Probably not. IBM spokesmen are adamant that the divisions will retain control of their own architectures. The office will simply try to identify where parallel design efforts can be combined.

By Chris Rose

It seems that, to start with, the architecture office will spend much of its time co-or

dinating the development of the processor and memory subsystem work. However the extent to which it ends up working in an advisory role, or as an arm with real clout, remains to be seen. The third section, dubbed the ‘program office’ is in charge of developing the common plumbing; the power supplies, the cooling systems and input-output boards that all the server divisions need. It’s under the control of Gerald O’Rourke, previously the engineering operations manager of the RS/6000 Division. The plan is that O’Rourke will build ad hoc, cross-divisional teams to design standard components that are usable across the whole range of systems, occasionally stretching right down into the client domain. For the first time in quite a while, IBM is formally trying to get its disparate parts to work as a team. The same is true on the software side. But instead of producing a new, co-ordinating division, IBM stuffed all the working into the Personal Software Products operation, Workplace’s original home. There is a new position, though, somewhat analogous to Phil Hester’s – Dr Peter Schneider was named IBM vice-president development, responsible for co-ordinating the development of Workplace technologies and their incorporation into software products in all IBM divisions. Like Hester, Schneider reports directly to senior vice-president and group executive John Thompson. However the same announcement also stated that Lee Reiswig, Personal Software Products’ president was in charge of Workplace development and marketing efforts. Workplace developers in the Personal Software Products AS/400 and RS/6000 divisions all report to Reiswig’s assistant David Schleicher. Ominously, the System/390 Division continues to do its own thing. What exactly are Workplace technologies? As far as we can work out, the IBM definition goes thus: Workplace technologies are any bits of system software which we think are really, really nice, will work well together and are objecty, in a distributed kind of way. Perhaps that is a little unfair, however, there are few terms quite so nebulous in the computer industry today. The parts that IBM likes to talk about most are: 1) the Workplace microkernel, based on Mach 3.0, which used to be called Workplace OS; and 2) SOM and DSOM; the System Object Model and its Distributed extension which provide a flexible way of building object-oriented, distributed applications; 3) A common look and feel. This is a tricky one, since we have recently been told that the Workplace Shell graphical user interface on OS/2 is not a Workplace technology,. Therefore there must be another Workplace graphical user interface hanging about somewhere (perhaps Taligent’s People Places & Things metaphor?) There are probably some other Workplace technologies lurking somewhere, but we can’t say what they are. Workplace may look a bit of a mess, but it does have a reassuring pragmatism about it: if there is a consensus that something is A Good Thing, it is dubbed a ‘Workplace Technology.’ and is spread around the systems. And as with the Systems Technology & Architecture Division, the Workplace push formalised work that was already going on. So, for example, the AS/400 and Personal Software divisions had already committed to using the Workplace Microkernel and various Taligent technology – the announcement extended this formally into the RS/6000 camp. Similarly AS/400s, personal computers and RS/6000s will all be using the PowerPC chip by next year. But what about the mainframe? It is still looking lonely and out of place, despite all this work. IBM has stated baldly that MVS will not be moving to the Workplace microkernel.

Cause for hope

There are no plans to produce a System/390 based on PowerPC chips. Though the Enterprise Systems Division is working on larger parallel machines using PowerPC processors, these will run a variant of AIX, not MVS. Well, on the hardware side, Hester’s group will no-doubt find some way of rationalising mainframe technology a bit. This has already started with the move to develop CMOS versions of the System/3

90 processor. It is likely that the Systems Technology & Architecture Division will manage to design common memory cache architectures – or something else – that the CMOS mainframe as well as the other divisions will be able to use. No doubt, air cooled models, using the same chassis as large AS/400s or RS/6000s can be devised. And on the software side, there is a commitment to graft SOM and DSOM onto MVS. It will all help, but the fact will remain that the mainframe will be the outsider, forced to use different technologies to IBM’s other machines. And perhaps here we have stumbled on a key difference between this year’s announcements and those that characterised Systems Application Architecture. Systems Technology & Architecture and Personal Software Products are working with technology that is very much the product of the personal computer and Unix workstation community, whereas SAA was driven by the Enterprise Systems. Then the mainframe was central to everything, today it is peripheral. Perhaps that is a cause for hope. (C) PowerPC News Mail add(AT)power.globalnews.com