>Hitachi has been losing its position in the mainframe market
for the past couple of years. But it aims to fight back in 2001
with its new model - Hercules. Nicholas Enticknap reports.
Hitachi took the mainframe market completely by surprise two
months ago (Computer Weekly, 9 March 2000) by announcing its
temporary withdrawal. The decision leaves IBM and Amdahl as the
only two companies actively marketing System 390 mainframes
today.
HDS Europe systems manager Chris Douglas says, "Hitachi has
decided to shift resources to a new generation server, code-named
Hercules. It will bring it to market in the second half of 2001."
As for existing systems, "We are reducing the volume of Trinium and
Pilot systems. We are continuing to market them to our existing
customers, but we will not necessarily be doing market generation
activities into the IBM base," Douglas says. Hitachi's other
European distributor, Comparex, has taken the same position.
Hitachi's decision signals the end of the road for its Advanced
Cmos-ECL (Ace) technology and for the Skyline and Trinium mainframe
ranges based on it. The company is falling into line with all the
other mainframe suppliers, both within and outside the IBM world,
by turning to Cmos logic circuitry as the base technology for its
next generation. Hitachi was always going to have to do this
eventually, but the end for the bipolar systems has come sooner
than the company expected.
The Ace story started in the early 1990s. At that time there had
been a catastrophic decline in mainframe sales, fuelled by a
worldwide recession, plus the ready availability of open systems
selling at a much lower price than mainframes. A major reason for
the price differential was that mainframes were constructed from
technology purpose-built for high performance IT systems. The
manufacturing costs were higher than for the commodity components
used in smaller systems, and so the street prices were higher.
In 1992, IBM accepted that customers would no longer pay premium
prices for mainframes, and that it had to change its cost base. So
the company took the decision to abandon traditional mainframe ECL
circuitry in favour of Cmos. Shortly afterwards, Fujitsu, Amdahl's
main technology partner, announced it was doing the same.
Cmos offered three main advantages. First, it was much cheaper,
because it was being used in a variety of systems and was being
produced by a large number of chip manufacturers. Second, the pace
of development promised to be faster, because so many more
companies were investing in it. Third, it offered substantial
environmental benefits - reduced cooling, heat dissipation, power
consumption and floor space.
Against this there was, in 1992, one huge disadvantage. The Cmos
technology of the day generated nothing like the same processing
power as bipolar technologies such as ECL. When IBM introduced its
first generation Cmos mainframes in late 1994, the uniprocessor was
rated at 12 mips, while the last of the company's ECL uniprocessors
offered 60 mips. Even at the much faster rate of technology
development offered by Cmos, it was clearly going to be some years
before a Cmos system could deliver the same power as an ECL
system.
IBM and Fujitsu/Amdahl's decision to abandon Cmos at this stage
was thus a bold and risky one. The other player in the market,
Hitachi, adopted a quite different strategy. The company decided
there was mileage left in ECL and embarked on a development project
to produce circuitry which combined the speed advantages of ECL
with the environmental and cost advantages of Cmos. This became
Ace.
As a result, when Hitachi Data Systems and Comparex launched
mainframes built from Ace circuitry as the Skyline and the M2000
respectively, they were alone in the market. When initially
launched in 1995, a top-end Skyline delivered 780 mips, compared to
the 480 mips of the top-end bipolar machine from IBM and the much
smaller 160 mips of the contemporary top-end Cmos machine.
Hitachi also had a second line of attack - its own range of Cmos
mainframes. Rather than pursue two separate development efforts, it
bought Cmos processors from arch-rival IBM and mated them with some
of the I/O technology from Skyline to produce the Pilot series
(sold by Comparex as the C2000).
This two-pronged strategy was very successful. Throughout the
mid-1990s Hitachi gained market share from both IBM and Amdahl, to
the point where it ended up with well over 20% of the total market.
Furthermore, because Skyline was unique, HDS and Comparex were able
to command premium prices for it - at 10% to 15% above the rate for
Cmos systems.
This golden period lasted until IBM's G5 systems arrived in late
1998, followed shortly afterwards by Amdahl's Millennium 800 in
early 1999. These two ranges were the first Cmos systems to offer
more power than the predecessor ECL machines, and eroded much of
Hitachi's advantage. Only at the very top of the Skyline range did
HDS and Comparex have a system bigger than anything IBM or Amdahl
offered. At this point, Hitachi started to lose market share.
Nonetheless, Hitachi continued to invest in Ace and unveiled Ace
II systems in early 1999, with general availability last September.
HDS called them Trinium, Comparex M3000. They went up to 12
processors, but 16-ways were also promised, and HDS announced the
availability of these systems as recently as February.
But Hitachi was continuing to lose market share. One estimate
was that sales fell from 21% of the market by value in 1997 to 14%
in 1998, and has since fallen further to a level below 10%. Not
only has Hitachi not been selling as much, but many of the Skylines
installed have been replaced.
In addition, the company suffered a setback with its Trinium
systems, having to revise downwards the promised performance levels
by about a quarter last October. Trinium has, in any case, not
proved popular with users, mainly because the environmental
disadvantages of ECL mean a significantly higher cost of ownership.
Only four have been installed in the whole of Europe in the year
since its launch. Pilot has also not sold particularly well. And
Hitachi needed a new development strategy for this part of the
range, as the OEM agreement with IBM ran out at the end of last
year. All these developments led to the decision in March to put
mainframe marketing on temporary hold.
HDS is promising it will come back in with Hercules in 2001.
Douglas says Hercules will be based on Hitachi's Cmos-based
technology, using the experience of Ace to get faster technology,
but he is unable to be more specific.
He continues, "[Hitachi is] looking at functional requirements,
especially multiplatform: not only S/390 but Unix and NT, running
in separate logical partitions."
Douglas argues that this is a logical continuation of the policy
followed with the company's 7700 disc sub-system. "Two years ago
7700 was entirely S/390: now 50% of 7700 sales are for open
systems. Hercules follows the same philosophy".
In the meantime, IBM and Amdahl can hardly contain their glee.
Both companies have been enjoying good sales recently, apart from a
hiatus around the turn of the millennium because of the Y2K freeze.
The mainframe market is not growing as fast as the Unix and NT
markets, but is still growing at something like 60% a year, which
is more than enough to be viable.
For Amdahl, the Hitachi withdrawal is particularly good news.
The firm slipped badly in the mid-1990s when it went three years
without producing any new models, and has been playing catch-up
ever since. Now Amdahl is back in the position it enjoyed for 20
years and built its name with: that of having the most powerful
mainframe on the market. The top-end 2000E (the 16-way 2168E) is
rated at 2,007mips, compared to the top-end IBM 12-way 9672-ZZ7 of
about 1,600mips.
For the future, according to vice-president of server business
and marketing Carol Stone, "We will have a mid-life kicker at the
end of this year, which will increase performance by 25%. Then
there will be a completely new machine for the end of 2001."
All of this is underpinned by a substantial development effort.
Amdahl gets its base technology from parent company Fujitsu, but
nonetheless employs 300 engineers at its California headquarters
dedicated to System 390 work. Amdahl director of system
architecture and performance Mark Gehoon says, "The things we
develop are partitioning software, system management software and
control software, plus some connectivity hardware. We develop
firmware for that. With firmware and system management software we
are much closer to customers. Fujitsu's expertise is in the bricks
and mortar."
IBM, meanwhile, is beginning to focus its attention on the next
big step forward, the move to 64-bit addressing. That will come
with a system code-named Freeway at the end of this year, probably
November. Support for it will be built into the next release of the
operating system, R10, due in September.
Beyond that, says IBM System 390 consultant Peter Norris, will
be "the microcode component of Freeway, which will include lots of
new functions and features I can't tell you about, affecting the
PR/SM and sysplex layers of the machine. That is what will turn the
machine into Freeway".
Beyond that again, is the move to virtual 64-bit addressing,
about which IBM is currently saying nothing. That is a bigger
change, as it will involve changes to all the subsystems like DB2
and Cics. To judge from the length of time it took IBM to
"sysplex-enable" these subsystems, full 64-bit capability will not
be delivered until 2003 or 2004.
That is the challenge Amdahl will have to meet. Gehoon is
relaxed about it. "It's business as usual," he says. "That will be
the third major architectural change in the past 12 years, after XA
and ESA. By the end of the year, we will respond on 64-bit
capability. Around 3,000 mips is the limit at which 31 bits runs
out of gas. We will be under 3,000 mips till 64-bit arrives. We
don't know the specifics, but we do know how it has to be put
together. We did that with XA and ESA. So we have it 90% now, and
we'll produce the other 10% when we see the specs. Software takes
longer than hardware, which affords us a window of compatibility
lag."
The move to 64-bit is a challenge Hitachi will also have to
meet, and it will be harder for the Japanese company as it is
trying to achieve other objectives at the same time. There must be
doubts about the ability of Hitachi to produce a system such as
Hercules by the end of 2001, and the absence of detailed
information about it does not inspire confidence. The company has a
major marketing challenge in convincing the System 390 user base of
its continued commitment to that market if it is not to disappear
from sight altogether.
The slow move from ECL to Cmos
1992 - 4Q:IBM decides to abandon development of bipolar
technology for mainframes
1994 - 3Q:IBM delivers first range of Cmos mainframes,
the 72
1995 - 3Q: HDS announces first Ace technology mainframes,
the Skyline series
1996 - 3Q:Amdahl delivers first Cmos mainframes, the
Millennium 500 series
1998 - 3Q:IBM delivers first Cmos mainframes that exceed
the power levels of the old ECL systems, the 9672-G5
1999 - 1Q:HDS launches second generation Ace mainframes,
the Trinium range
1999 - 2Q: Amdahl brings out current Millennium 2000 C
and E models
2000 - 4Q: IBM scheduled to launch Freeway, its first
64-bit mainframe
2000 - 4Q:Amdahl promises 25% performance improvement
over current products
2001 - 2H:Hitachi to return to mainframe market with
Hercules, a multiple operating system
2001 - 2H:Amdahl scheduled to launch its first 64-bit
mainframe range
The name game
IBM's next generation of mainframes is currently known by the
code name Freeway, or G7, and first release of the operating system
that will run on it as OS/390 R10. But don't expect them to be
called this when they actually see the light of day.
IBM is currently going through a mind-bending exercise deciding
what to call them. The powers that be have decided that, as we had
System 360 in the 1960s, System 370 in the 1970s and System 390 in
the 1990s (they were obviously asleep in the 1980s), IBM needs a
new name for a new millennium (but they can't call it Millennium,
because that's what the Amdahl range is called). OS/390 will get a
new name at the same time.
Web-serving on a mainframe
IBM has been arguing for some time that a System 390 mainframe
is the best option for users providing e-commerce services based on
data already held on mainframes.
Iowa-based Principal Financial Group has moved a major part of
its Web services from a Unix environment to an IBM S/390 mainframe.
"Performance has improved dramatically - our typical response time
is only two seconds now," says Dale Ward, assistant director for
information services. "With our core data already residing on the
IBM S/390 and the back-end transactions already taking place there,
making the same S/390 our Web server allows us to cut out several
steps, eliminating potential points of failure along the way."