MIPS RISC shop Tandem Computers Inc has been quietly working on building central processing unit-independence into its NonStop operating system. The company says it could now jump processor engines in as little as a year, although it has no plans to do so at present. It is just that with chip vendors now locked in mortal combat and price-performance issues ever more important, it believes that hedging its bets is a sensible thing to do. Tandem has not actually had NonStop up on other processors, but has been playing with instruction set models of non-MIPS technology. It is not making a big deal of the fact, given its insistence that compiler technologies are of more consequence to it, and says it fully expects to work up through current MIPS generations. NonStop, a microkernel re-write of the Cupertino, California-based company’s proprietary Guardian system software runs on the new Himalaya fault-tolerant systems which use MIPS R3000 and R4000 architectures. NonStop runs existing applications under a Guardian personality. The company is gradually bringing the components of its promised Posix and open systems ‘Open Services’ personality for NonStop together. The overlay is not an implementation of Tandem’s System V.4-based NonStop-UX, which runs on its separate line of MIPS-based Integrity machines, rather it is a collection of Application Programming Interfaces, Posix, SQL and other extensions designed to attract Tandem’s independent software vendors to the open systems world. The firm says it now has six customers using Posix services calls on top of NonStop, and expects a dozen others to come on line by the autumn. By then it should have early implementations of Novell Inc’s Tuxedo transaction processing monitor up on the microkernel – it is already offering Open Data Base Connectivity support. If it can get general shipments of Tuxedo and a Distributed Computing Environment implementation out of the door by year-end it believes it will only be around three months off target. Tandem says the process of bringing open systems-type services like Tuxedo over to NonStop, tracking the behaviour of software calls and other things, has helped it build more open services functionality into NonStop than it probably planned.
NonStop Moneymaker
An IBM Corp complex instruction set personality is also due on NonStop courtesy of Newbury, Berkshire-based Micro Focus Plc. NonStop systems account for between 80% and 85% of Tandem’s revenue, with Unix making up the rest: it puts 13% back into research and development. It says it has shipped 550 K10000 and 1,200 K1000 Himalaya models in the first two quarters of delivery. After 16 Central Processing Units, the systems K10000 goes to a theoretical 4,000-odd processors – are clustered using fibre-optic links. Tandem’s main business remains fault-tolerant sales, with decision support second, followed by messaging-electronic mail-and-document interchange. Its market is supported by around 300 independent software vendors with 1,000-odd applications that impact some 50% of Tandem’s revenue. Tandem says that this is the key advantage its software has over that of competitors, which now include many of the parallel or scalable system builders as well as traditional fault-tolerant rivals such as Marlborough, Massachusetts-based Stratus Computer Inc and Sequoia Systems Inc. GFLOPS are even more meaningless than MIPS used to be, director of NonStop product marketing Chris Rooke says. It is all about applications, what software you can run and cents per Megabyte, he adds, seeing the prospect of 50Mb 1.2 disks next year. Oracle, Informix, Sybase and DB2 databases are having to be re-engineered for parallel tasks to which their lock-management architectures are inherently unsuited, says Tandem. It claims its NonStop SQL database engine hashing algorithms negate the need for searching, taking less space and using less input-output than other architectures.
