Tandem NonStop Kernel Product Announcement--Product Information July 1993 Executive summary Tandem announces the NonStop Kernel, our next generation of operating system software. Open standards are defining the world of computing, and client/server dominates as the architecture for new applications. Tandem's new generation of operating system software delivers strategic functionality for open systems. The new functions and products extend the Tandem fundamentals and client/server architecture to a greater number of applications, especially those that require highly available business solutions. Tandem's new system software gives customers the ability to configure and support commercial, open, OLTP, and database environments that range in size from modest to massive. Customers migrating to the new operating system will gain quality, higher levels of functionality, and complete compatibility with existing applications. This represents Tandem's commitment to protecting customer investment. Over a wide range of price and performance offerings, the NonStop Kernel extends Tandem's expertise in scalable parallel processing, distributed relational databases, and continuous availability to greater numbers of applications and business installations. Product overview The Tandem NonStop Kernel is the foundation on which Tandem will build products and programs key to delivering our strategic initiatives, including open and client/server computing, and massively parallel processing. The NonStop Kernel is a layered operating system that consists of low-level functions such as interprocess communication; I/O interface procedures; and memory, time, and process management. These core services support a number of system services that manage different application program interfaces and unique Tandem features. The system services provide fault tolerance and data integrity and perform system tasks on behalf of user programs. These services include: o Formatting o I/O drivers support o Performance measurement o NonStop process-pair support o File management o Standard security o Support for single-system image o Low-level transaction management These services have been designed to increase the capacity of the operating system and allow customers to execute more transactions and configure more devices on their Tandem systems. The NonStop Kernel is the foundation on which all open systems development is based. The NonStop Kernel is vital to establishing open interfaces, enabling heterogeneous system interoperability, and allowing applications to port to NonStop systems. The NonStop Kernel provides client/server-based transaction services and extends the Tandem architecture to massively parallel commercial computing environments. This new functionality supports the application interfaces, formats, and protocols required to implement formal and de facto industry standards and to provide gateways for easy access to Tandem fundamentals. Features and benefits Strategic software platform. The new NonStop Kernel demonstrates Tandem's commitment to high- reliability systems and software. The NonStop Kernel represents the culmination of unprecedented effort directed at producing a new standard of operating system availability. The new architecture has improved system reliability and scalability by extending process, device, and concurrent message limits. Key areas of the operating system have been restructured to simplify the access to low-level functions and improve cross-product coordination. These changes improve the overall reliability and availability of the operating system. They also reduce the time and effort needed to introduce future products and to support open environments and client services. Restructuring the operating system allows Tandem to implement industry standards, new technology, and open applications. The new interfaces to the operating system provide isolation between components. Isolated components that are currently nonstandard may be substituted with standard components in the future. This structuring has allowed Tandem to optimize the core services and key system services for the underlying hardware and to maximize the price/performance benefits of low-cost RISC technology. While many competitors have imposed some burden on their customers as they adopt the native function, Tandem's seamless, native migration was accomplished transparently to the customer. The only difference the customer notices is that the performance of the Tandem RISC system increases significantly when the new operating system is installed. Tandem's NonStop Kernel is the primary vehicle for introducing new products and features to Tandem's customers. Many of the products and features that support Tandem's open, client/server, massively parallel processing programs are available only on the new operating system. The operating system supports new functions, including the Common Run- Time Environment, which facilitates mixed-language programming; the STK 4400 Tape Library Unit attachment, which is the largest, most cost-effective, most automated tape storage system available; a new, high-performance Ethernet controller, providing faster TCP/IP and Expand over LAN functionality; and ANSI C compliance for writing standard C applications. Other new products that will be available with the new operating system include: o A tape cataloging product for online tape inventory tracking o A new, low-cost 5180 compatible tape subsystem o TCP/IP performance benefits o SNA peer-to-peer support o Enhanced releases of the X.400, X.435, and X.500 messaging products Significant improvement in RISC performance In this new generation of operating system, Tandem has restructured the core and key system services to provide optimal performance for our RISC customers' benefit. The NonStop Kernel capitalizes on the inherent price/performance advantages of the underlying low-cost RISC technology and delivers performance improvements of up to 30 percent for RISC- based applications. Open NonStop Kernel Today, customers are asking for open systems that can enhance their investments in computer technology by reducing costs and increasing productivity. There are important advantages for those companies that use the open opportunity to maximize the use of their applications, programmer skills, and interoperability while still providing unique added value. Open systems allow customers the freedom to choose the right system for their business environment, to choose a system that has the right personality to gain a competitive advantage in today's changing marketplace. Tandem is committed to open systems. With the new NonStop Kernel, Tandem introduces the ability to provide new computing standards quickly and easily as they become available through industry-sponsored review processes. In this manner, Tandem can preserve our customers' investment in the fundamentals important to their high-availability environment, while providing an interface to other system personalities. The Guardian personality is available today and will be followed by a UNIX personality based on POSIX.1 and POSIX.2 standards. Generally, references to personalities are confined to operating systems, but as more portions of computing domains are standardized, the use of personalities will grow into other domains such as messaging, database, and transaction services. Facilitating more than one personality delivers a distinct advantage over single choices for any given domain. To provide support for existing applications and access to Guardian capabilities, Tandem continues to support the Guardian application program interface. This API has been improved to allow Tandem to implement emerging standards and to deliver products that enhance our open computing environment. Currently Tandem is active in X/Open, OSF, OSI, and ANSI committees and is a founding member of the SQL Access Group. Tandem has announced support for major open, industry standards including POSIX.1, POSIX.2, the OSF/Distributed Computing Environment (DCE), and several ANSI standards for languages and databases. Supporting many of these standards, Tandem is positioned to obtain XPG4 certification. Client transaction servers Client/server computing means freedom of choice for users and increased cost effectiveness and competitiveness for your organization. Low-cost RISC technology, coupled with industry-standard interfaces, has brought the powerful computing models of decision support, electronic data exchange, and office automation to all types of businesses, regardless of size or computer sophistication. Tandem systems are based on a cooperative-processing architecture that enables Tandem to deliver an unmatched ability to manage many diverse clients. During the last three years, Tandem has continued to expand open offerings beyond databases and networks and to make advances toward opening our server technology by incorporating industry standards. Tandem took advantage of the hardware standards provided by the commodity marketplace when porting the operating system from a CISC to a RISC platform without requiring even a recompile of the customer's application. This seamless migration has allowed Tandem to deliver price/performance improvements without burdening customers with the risk and cost of application change. Now, with this new NonStop Kernel announcement, Tandem builds on this RISC implementation by adding support for the interfaces and protocols needed to access other databases, clients, and servers through open database connectivity products and gateways. As the OLTP technology leader, Tandem integrates OLTP applications with client/server computing in a parallel server environment with assured transaction integrity. Client/server computing has traditionally focused on decision support at the departmental level. The economics of cooperative computing have driven the technology upward into more business-critical applications and outward into more diverse cross-corporate functions. The workstation technology that provides the basis for most competitive client/server installations is subject to reliability and data integrity problems. As client/server installations grow and support business computing activities, the need to implement transaction protection, together with client/server cost efficiency, will become imperative. No other vendor is better positioned to provide industry-standard database engines and transaction processing monitors than Tandem. Tandem is also announcing plans to provide Tuxedo as an addition to the current Pathway client/server transaction processing software. We will participate openly and fully in emerging standards for transaction processing monitors. Recent additions to the NonStop SQL database system enable it to provide information warehouse solutions on a single system or on a distributed client/server network. Tandem transaction servers provide the most extensive client support in the industry. Using our Remote Server Call product (RSC), Tandem provides client-to-server connectivity with transaction protection to clients running DOS, OS/2, Windows, Macintosh system 7, and almost every variant of UNIX, including Tandem's Integrity S/2, HP, Sun, and RS/6000's AIX. These clients can use a choice of protocols including Async, X.25, NETBIOS, TCP/IP, Appletalk, and soon, Novell's IPX/SPX. The POET/DDE Gateway tool makes it easy to develop client/transaction server applications using the leading vendor tools, including Powerbuilder, Visual Basic, Caseworks, Paradox, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, and others. Additionally, for open application development, Tandem provides the Microfocus Workbench, TI/IEF from Texas Instruments, and others. A variety of gateways (DAL, ODBC, Oracle) is available to give users a choice of popular client tools for database access and decision support. Client/server doesn't get much easier. The proof is that more than 300 customers have created large mission-critical client/server applications using Tandem systems. Taken together, Tandem provides the operating environment to maximize server cost-effectiveness in an integrated, cooperative environment. With client/server computing, users can access the data, computers, and network services they need from any computer on the network. Tandem builds servers that can start out locally and grow in geographic diversity, giving customers worldwide access to their business operations. This business philosophy allows Tandem to design systems that provide LAN file server functionality as well as corporate database file services. Customers can design their Tandem server systems to meet their current or future business needs, even when they can't predict how their application requirements will grow and change. Tandem continues to develop the client/server environment by incorporating new hardware technology and new protocols as they are introduced. This enables customers to access information easily across the boundaries of their existing business systems and communications networks, and even across the boundaries of their own organization into those of their customers and suppliers. Scalable software stack Highly parallel computing environments allow processing to occur on cooperative platforms that demand system scalability without redefining the computing environment. In this new generation of operating systems, the Tandem NonStop Kernel was designed to provide new levels of scalability and to remove limits on database size or transaction throughput. The system has been expanded to create supportability for large, single-site environments as well as for the distributed environments. In this environment, other platforms-both large and small, Tandem and otherwise-can share in computing transactions. The system services take advantage of the distributed, parallel computing power available on the Tandem systems by allowing the system environment to grow to hundreds of processors and processing sites-to become commercial, massively parallel processing engines. This allows the Tandem NonStop Kernel to support thousands of devices, transactions, and users while allowing replicated application programs to appear as a single processing entity. Providers of computer-based services view these applications as critical to the success of their businesses and are making ever-increasing demands on the reliability of their computer environments. For these critical business applications, Tandem understands that the demand for reliability means far more than fault tolerance. It means around-the-clock availability of data and applications, and the assured integrity of that data. Tandem delivers a broad range of scalable servers that addresses the need of the high-growth reliability market place. It is the industry's leading architecture for bulletproof availability. o Tandem's software stack was designed with the same parallelism and is scalable in every respect. o The open, parallel NonStop Kernel is replicated across all Tandem processors in a network, and through parallel interprocess communication, workloads can be reliably distributed. o The NonStop SQL database is capable of higher levels of parallel operation compared to other commercial relational database products. These features also increase its reliability. o The transaction monitoring services offered by Pathway and TMF reliably protect all classes of Tandem servers equally and grow transparently as the installed network of systems increases to meet the needs of highly parallel commercial processing. In fact, Tandem offers scalable software products for all aspects of commercial computing, including system management, networking, security, operations, and application development. Reliable, scalable services such as these increase customer satisfaction and allow competitive differentiation based on Tandem's ability to satisfy critical business demands. The Tandem NonStop Kernel provides new levels of price/performance for RISC systems and expands these systems without changing the customer's application. NonStop Kernel restructuring allows customers to expand their single-system image to large, commercial, parallel engines. This is particularly important to the new NonStop Himalaya range of products, available only with the new operating system. The parallel operating system allows Tandem to deliver linear growth from 10 to 10,000 transactions per second across this product range and to continue to offer the best price/performance for reliable, scalable applications. Single-system image The new features and scalability of the NonStop Kernel enable Tandem system software users to manage a wide range of CPUs as a single system, optimize manageability, and reduce costs. The new operating system gives customers more processes, devices, and configuration options to extend the system image to a wider range of applications. With Tandem system software, it is possible to distribute the database and file system transparently to large geographic areas and yet manage your data as if it were all local. Workload distribution across processors and systems is enabled through Pathway. In the event of a failure, automatic recovery across multiple processors and multiple systems is facilitated with TMF. NonStop/NETMASTER provides a single management point for heterogeneous networks, including Tandem systems. All of this is made possible through the combination of Tandem's parallel software architecture (available with the NonStop Kernel) and the hardware design of Tandem's scalable systems. Technical specifications Availability The Tandem NonStop Kernel will be widely available for all Tandem systems supported as of Q4FY93. All new Tandem systems will be shipped with this release of the operating system. The NonStop Kernel is available on the Tandem D20 release, a fully supported release subject to all the release rules and provisions of the Tandem Software Release and Support Plan. The formal end-of-support date for C30 is December 31, 1994. All new functional enhancements will be added to the NonStop Kernel. C-series- based customer applications will be supported for compatibility with the NonStop Kernel. System requirements. The systems and configurations supported by the NonStop Kernel are listed below. These systems are supported on the NonStop Kernel only: o NonStop K10000, 64 megabytes o NonStop K1000, 32 megabytes o NonStop K100 and K110, 16 mega-bytes; K120, 32 megabytes These systems are supported on either the NonStop Kernel or C-series: o NonStop Cyclone, 32 megabytes o NonStop Cyclone/R, 32 megabytes (includes hardened, central office models) o NonStop CLX 2000, 32 megabytes o NonStop CLX 800 series, CLX 700 series, 16 megabytes (includes hardened, central office models) o NonStop CLX/R 1100, 16 megabytes; CLX/R 1200, 32 megabytes o NonStop VLX, 16 megabytes Resource requirements The NonStop Kernel offers significant performance increases for RISC customers. On average, RISC systems migrating from C30 will realize a transaction path-length decrease of as much as 20 percent. Because this decrease allows a processor to perform more work, most customers will experience an increase in their RISC system's processing capacity of up to 30 percent. As RISC customers take advantage of the additional processor capacity available with the new operating system and increase their system workload, additional system resources to support the increases in processing power may be required. Account planning in preparation for the migration to this new operating system requires considering several factors related to performance, architectural limits, application development environment, and system management. The following discussion highlights the main resource requirements. Processor Compared to the C30 release, the total transaction path length on RISC systems has decreased between 15 and 20 percent for OLTP applications. The transaction path length for CISC systems increases by the same amount as when moving from C30 to D10 (that is, by approximately 10 to 15 percent). The actual impact of the transaction path-length change on a given system will vary, depending on the system configuration, use of existing resources, and nature of the application. Memory RISC systems running on this release of the operating system require a minimum of 32 megabytes and CISC systems require a minimum of 16 megabytes. In general, the working memory set needed to support an existing application will increase at least 15 percent relative to C30. Memory requirements for a given system will vary, depending on the configuration, existing memory use, and the nature of the application. For RISC and Cyclone CISC systems, the additional computing capacity may require more memory to support the addition of extra applications or workload to the existing configuration. Disk space In most cases, the disk space requirements for this release of the operating system will require slightly more disk space than was needed for the C30 release. Preliminary measurements indicate that customers using many optional products will need to plan for 5 to 10 percent more disk space for this release. Refer to the installation guide (#089363) for further disk-space requirements and sizing information. A detailed discussion of the requirements for memory and the impact of the transaction path-length changes can be found in the PERFORM file in the release documentation subvolume (Y9230D20) on the D20 SUT at first customer ship. The CISC version of this information is also available on the release documentation subvolume (Y9230D10) on the D10 SUT. It is helpful for CISC customers planning to migrate to the NonStop Kernel to review this information before developing a migration plan, since the planning considerations are the same. Details about the amount of disk space required can be found in the installation guide, also located in the release documentation subvolume. Contact your Tandem sales representative or system analyst if you need help obtaining a copy of any of this information or if you have early account-planning requirements. A number of Tandem hardware and software products supported in the C30 release have been discontinued and will no longer be supported. Refer to the Product Maintenance List (PML) or the Tandem NonStop Kernel: Guardian D10 Version product announcement (#300242) for detailed information on discontinu-ations. Both are available on InfoWay. Migration considerations All known C30 applications are fully compatible with the new NonStop Kernel. To take advantage of all of the new extensions, features, and products, you may need to change some applications. Migration considerations can be categorized in three areas: accessing architectural extensions, migrating from a CISC to a RISC-based system, and planning performance and capacity management. The System Migration Planning Guide (#096297) and the Guardian Application Conversion Guide (#096047) cover all the planning steps in this migration process. Applications can gain additional benefits by having their program code accelerated. The Accelerator Manual (#096765) explains how to use the Accelerator, a programming tool that optimizes object code for RISC processors. Applications containing privileged code may need to be revised to run on the new operating system. Service and support Specially trained staff (regional migration specialists) within each region are available to assist customers with implementation and migration issues. Several new and updated manuals are available with this new operating system release. Migration topics are covered specifically and extensively in the System Migration Planning Guide. Consult the following manuals before planning your Tandem operating system migration: System Migration Planning Guide 096297 Guardian Application Conversion Guide 096047 Guardian Programmer's Guide 096042 Guardian Procedure Calls Reference Manual 096044 Common Run-Time Environment Programmer's Guide 096766 Accelerator Manual 096765 In addition to the manuals listed, more than 90 manuals have been revised in preparing this new operating system release. All CD Read subscribers will receive a CD-ROM disc containing the manuals for the products associated with this release. To order printed copies of manuals, U.S. customers should call 800-243-6886; international customers should contact their local Tandem representative. The class Migrating to the Tandem NonStop Kernel covers topics such as changes to the operating system, new interfaces, discontinued products, and mixed network issues. The first presentation of the revised class is scheduled for early September 1993. For those customers considering Tandem RISC systems for the first time, the "TNS/R Migration and Installation" class will be updated to reflect the new operating system changes as well. You can register for either class by contacting your nearest Customer Education Center or by calling 800-621- 9198 (U.S.). Professional Services Tandem has updated the Migration Planning Service to assist customers in designing a successful migration plan. Tandem specialists will provide your migration team with the expertise and methods necessary to develop a high- quality migration plan that can be implemented on schedule and within budget. Contact your Tandem representative for information on this planning service. Tandem Computers Incorporated World Headquarters 19333 Vallco Parkway Cupertino, CA 95014-2599, USA +1-408-285-6000 Americas Division Headquarters 19191 Vallco Parkway Cupertino, CA 95014-2594, USA 800-482-6336 European Division Headquarters Van Heuven Goedhartlaan 935 1181 LD Amstelveen, Netherlands +31-20-545-4911 Asia-Pacific Division Headquarters 10596 N. Tantau Avenue Cupertino, CA 95014-0729, USA +1-408-285-3800; in Canada call 800-345-8636 Japan Division Headquarters Bungei Shunju Shinkan, 3-23 Kioicho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102, +81-3-3234-6000 Offices in the United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Europe, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, People's Republic of China, and Singapore. Distributors and other agents in Argentina, Colombia, Finland, Greece, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Israel, Korea, Malaysia, the Middle East, Peru, the Philippines, Portugal, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela. Tandem, Cyclone, Expand, Guardian, Integrity, NonStop, TMF, and the Tandem logo are trademarks of Tandem Computers Incorporated. All other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Technical specifications and availability are subject to change without notice. (c) 1993 Tandem Computers Incorporated. All rights reserved. ARBN 002 588 347 Printed in USA F3349-0793 Printed on recycled paper