In line with the current fashion, Unisys Corp is repositioning its A-Series mainframes (the ones from the Burroughs side of the company) to take account of the new world of open systems and client-server architectures. As part of this effort, it today introduces a new mid-range A Series model, the A11, and will move up the Co-operative Computing Environment software that first appeared on its Micro-A MA825 last year (CI No 1,616). With the Co-operative software providing standard application programming interfaces and using the Netwise Remote Procedure Call, it means that OS/2 and Unix machines can be connected via a 20M-bytes-per-second bus, enabling, for instance, a Unix or OS/2 application simultaneously to use the A11 as a transaction processing engine. Additional interworking facilities on the A11 have also been added, so that Open Systems Interconnection and TCP/IP networking, IBM’s SNA, Ethernet and NetWare support are all now available. Posix compliance for the MCP/AS operating system, however, is still under development and is not likely to appear until next year, while the company is also planning to provide open/OLTP, probably through an implementation of Unix System Laboratories Inc’s Tuxedo. The new A11s, which replace the A12 and A9 machines, providing an upgrade path for A5 and A6 users, are 48-bit single and dual processor machines running at 12MHz or 16MHz. The machines include an input-output subsystem said to be three times faster than that of the A5, brought down from the A16 and A19 models, along with resiliency and multi-processor partitioning features from the top-end models. The Co-operative Computing Environment software will also run on the A16 and A19, but not on the older models with the original input-output subsystem. Unisys expects that 85% of customers for the A11s will be existing A-Series users, and boasts of 20 first day orders, including the Federation of Danish Motorists in Denmark and Banque Bruxelles Lambert in Belgium. The 12MHz 211 versions are available immediately, the 16MHz 411s by June. Prices range from UKP225,000 to UKP600,000, and are claimed to provide dollars per transaction figures that compare well with Unix-based boxes, although benchmarks have not yet been released.
