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As discussed before, Platform Solutions emphatically rejects any suggestion that its product is an IBM zSeries emulator - even though there seems no other way to run z/OS on an Intel processor. It stoically insists that it is writing "microcode" for the Itanium to make it run z/OS "natively". Were that true, the support implications for Hewlett-Packard would be considerable. More recently, it has been suggested that Hewlett-Packard could sell, ship and support the hardware - possibly even taking over Level 1 and customisation functions. Many IBM Business Partners - some with good contact to VSE cusomers - are also Hewlett-Packard resellers.
"Since your site focuses on emulation and we are a PCM, it's probably not of interest to PSI to disclose any detailed information to you about our products and company."
Christian Reilly, Platform Solutions, 24 August 2004
(People who send things like this should include a warning - Thinkpad Transnotes are hard to clean.)
But the impression is spoiled by PSI's use of "Just-In-Time (JIT) cached instruction translation", eerily similar to Fundamental Software's descriptions of its FLEX-ES zSeries emulator which runs under UNIXware and Linux.
So to the "looks like a duck, walks like a duck, swims like a duck, flies like a duck, quacks like a duck and lays duck eggs" in the earlier analysis we can add that it just grew duck feathers.
The most likely reason for PSI's assertion - which stretches credulity beyond the limit - is a legal subtlety. Fundamental Software's FLEX-ES emulator entered the market along a convoluted path, coming to the modern world via an agreement with Sequent for emulation on the NUMA-Q product, followed by IBM's purchase of Sequent, inheritance of the contract and subsequent abortive attempt to market the NUMA-Q and FLEX-ES combination itself as the IBM xSeries 430 Enabled for System/390.
Since that time, obtaining both permission and pricing has been a complex and time-consuming affair. Apart from a number of standard packages at the 1GHz IA32 end, every system is in IBM terms an "SBO" - a Special Bid requiring individual authorisation from a number of IBM managers. Simple logistics within IBM (managers are busy people) mean that such bids can take weeks, despite some streamlining of the process. The process works, but it may take any given business partner some time to become accustomed to it - and several gave up in the early days.
Rather than allowing resellers and users the flexibility to choose the best underlying platform for emulation, PSI has made the choice for them - packaging a number of models at fixed performance levels. Their use of a specific model number (P5210) confirms this is the route they have chosen. Once such models are accepted, obtaining pricing for IBM and ISV software might be a much simpler process than it is for FLEX-ES systems. This impression is confirmed by their Intel partner page: "... allows partitions to be licensed as specific machine types, by means of the Multiple Base Server Facility". In later documents, the feature seems to have been renamed "Multiple Discrete Server Facility" - possibly to imply a relationship with Amdahl's Multiple Domain Facility, although it is almost certainly based on Intel's Virtualization Technology..
Since no one has yet tried "declaring" an emulation as a specific model, there is no experience in the field. The existing system took some eighteen months of blood, sweat, tears and hotel lobby phone calls to put in place - declaration may have as many pitfalls, although it seems that Platform Solutions obtained licensing for its "validation" on a customer site with a simple phone call.
The process of obtaining IBM's agreement for an entirely new software licensing scheme has been likened to a tag team of players each allowed two minutes to try to insert a 1" bolt through 1" holes in a stack of ten half-ton greased steel plates unrestrained on the deck of a North Sea trawler in heavy seas with the captain at best ambivalent about your success. "What's in it for IBM that's worth the risk and so much lawyer time?" - an entirely legitimate question. Given the difficulties Fundamental Software and its partners are having obtaining permission to ship 64-bit commercial systems, IBM's preferential treatment of Platform Solutions is quite stunning and might suggest some degree of co-operation.
There are downsides to fixed model licensing, and PSI's approach seems frankly anachronistic. Even IBM has recognised - note its "On Demand" initiatives - that users need more control and flexibility.
With the effort that IBM (and many other vendors) have put into marketing various forms of on-demand capability, it may be that customers - especially large ones - will demand the same from PSI. Indeed, the possibility exists that IBM will have no access to the Hewlett-Packard hosts used by PSI, and little opportunity to verify the system's performance - in contrast with the dongle licensing used by Fundamental Software. Performance improvments in the early life of PSI's product may enable subsequent versions of the emulator to provide greater throughout than they were initially licensed for.
A custom system is inevitably more expensive than a mass-produced one - and Hewlett-Packard has shipped more Hewlett-Packard Itianium-based servers than anyone else by quite a margin. Perhaps we should also add a bill to the list of duck-like characteristics. It seems unlikely it has written its own operating system (it would have to do all the machine check handling, for one thing) so its emulator probably runs under HP-UX.
The Itanium design (and its EPIC - Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing - architecture) originated in Hewlett-Packard. Fujitsu's absence from the second round of PSI's financing might be linked to the recent announcement of its own range of Itanium-based servers. Though none run zSeries emulation, Fujitsu might be wary of supporting a vendor using a competitor's Itanium server for fear of seeming to endorse it. Most of the RAS features claimed by PSI seem, in fact, to be features of the underlying HP platform, though this does not diminish their usefulness.
Despite the impression given in Gartner's note, according to its SHARE session PSI has not yet delivered 64-bit mode and is probably using IBM's Bimodal Migration Accomodation Offering to run z/OS 1.4 in 31-bit mode. Although Fundamental Software has a full and viable 64-bit z/Architecture emulation (ARCHLVL=2, qualified and used by IBM in the Partnerworld for Development program) it has not shipped a commercial 64-bit system. PSI's validation customer is running in 31-bit mode with z/OS 1.4 and DB2 V7. DB2 V8, of course, requires 64-bit mode. Perhaps getting around this restriction is another reason for declaring specific models rather than admitting that a duck is a duck after all.
But perhaps it's a duck that that hasn't yet learned to fly. The list of operating systems in PSI's background PDF document - "z/OS; OS/390; VSE; Linux/390; HP-UX, Microsoft Windows 2003 Datacenter and Enterprise editions; RedHat Linux; SuSE Linux" - conspicuously doesn't include VM. This creates the impression that Platform Solutions may have neither the Interpretive Execution Facility architecture extensions or VM assists. The vast majority of VSE customers around the world also run VM and are accustomed to its operational convenience.
PSI has guided analysts to an expectation of up to 200 MIPS for their systems, and "thousands of MIPS" in the future - although the latter is from the Linuxworld article, which contains many flights of pure fantasy. In fact the P5210 is probably positioned around 75 MIPS and is currently licensed for 15 to 18 MSUs - at 5 MIPS/MSU some 20% worse than IBM's software price/performance at 6.25 MIPS/MSU on the z890 6210.
75 MIPS would be at the high end of 64-bit emulation on a single processor 64-bit platform with an efficient emulator - our duck now has webbed feet. This is a market segment containing a few ex-Amdahl customers; committed PCM users, who may be high on PSI's calling list. With a commodity base, PSI will have the price/performance in raw emulation to adopt the old Amdahl practice of announcing a machine and then a few months later announcing slugged and double-slugged versions. But any degrade from 75 MIPS takes PSI into FLEX-ES territory, where it will have to compete with FLEX-ES' additional functionality.
Using multiple engines to reach higher MIPS figures is somewhat fraught, however. Even a "real" z990 shows rapidly diminishing returns above around twenty engines - the much less efficient cache sharing between multiple emulated processors brings this figure below ten. PSI's background document illustrates up to 52 processors.
75 MIPS is a kind of sweet spot in the market at the moment - go up from there and you have to provide Parallel Sysplex support - go down and you need the automation functionality (e.g., FakeTape) that FLEX-ES users find so useful down in the VM/VSE space. But it's a thin slice of the market already energetically served by IBM's z890, which offers tremendous configuration flexibility between 90 and 320 MIPS - one of IBM's smartest moves for a long time. The z890 is a very popular machine - IBM sold well over 500 in the last quarter of 2004 alone. This makes PSI's assertion that IBM is "neglecting" non-Fortune 500 companies somewhat puzzling.
Secondly, Fundamental's major partners Cornerstone Systems and T3 Technologies build their emulation offerings on IBM xSeries servers - so the user doesn't lose the IBM hardware maintenance link and IBM doesn't lose contact with the account. One IBM machine is simply being replaced with another. Although HP's products are reliable, the IBM label still counts for a lot in mainframe sites.
Within a few years, IBM will also be using something closer to a commodity chip in its mainframes. Though there are doubts about Itanium's future, Intel is bound to have an offering in the 64-bit space - but it is much more likely to be the non-EPIC Xeon, the full 64-bit version of which has just been announced. The key to long-term success for emulation solutions is added functionality - access to UNIXware/Linux networking, peripherals, automation, etc.
That is an area in which Platform Solutions has been notably silent.
References:
SHARE February 2005 Session 2818 (available from the PSI web site) Foil 17