Amdahl Corporation Press Release

AMDAHL ANNOUNCES A+UMA AND OPENTUNE UNIX PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT TOOLS

SUNNYVALE, Calif. (March 15, 1994) -- Amdahl Corporation introduced today the industry's first implementation of the Universal Measurement Architecture (UMA) specifications for instrumenting and gathering and managing data within the UNIX operating environment. The company also announced the availability of its OpenTune performance monitor, the first in a series of measurement application programs (MAPs) designed to accept and interpret UMA-based data.

A+UMA is Amdahl's implementation of the Computer Measurement Group's Performance Management Working Group (PMWG) specifications, which define interfaces for the gathering, management, and reporting of systems data. In addition to streamlining data collection and providing seamless access to historical data across the network, A+UMA will simplify system performance tuning by replacing independent UNIX utilities such as sar, sar2, and iostats. Because A+UMA collects data for multiple users only once and stores it in a standard, more compact format, overall system overhead is significantly reduced.

A+UMA is available on SunSoft's Solaris 2.3 operating system and is priced at $1,200. Amdahl's mainframe edition of A+UMA, priced at $5,000, is available on Amdahl's UTS operating system.

Prior to the UMA standard, only proprietary systems such as MVS included guidelines for instrumenting the operating system. "We took a leadership role in the PMWG's efforts to create this architecture, and we have focused our efforts on developing this technology because we want to help our large-enterprise, commercial computing customers better manage the proliferation of heterogeneous distributed computing environments within their organizations," noted Mike Orr, vice president and general manager of Amdahl's Open Enterprise Systems Division.

OpenTune is a performance monitor that collects, analyzes, and graphically displays A+UMA system performance data. This X-client, Motif-based MAP, with its flexible graphing options, seamlessly displays historical and current data, thus simplifying short- and long-term performance trend analysis. OpenTune's graph options include line, bar, and pie charts as well as an optional 3D version required to simplify interpretation of some complex displays.

The powerful MAP easily monitors hundreds of disks for response time anomalies or drive underutilization. An intuitive graphical user interface, coupled with a context-sensitive hypertext help system, facilitates the definition of data monitoring parameters and the setting of sampling intervals and thresholds. When thresholds are exceeded, audible and visual alarms are automatically initiated. OpenTune monitors UMA-based distributed computing environments via a single workstation or server running Sun OS 4.1 or Solaris 2.3. A single copy of OpenTune, which has the ability to monitor multiple servers, is priced at $24,000.

According to Orr, A+UMA and OpenTune are among the first of Amdahl's new series of A+View system management tools for the high- end server market.

Amdahl's Open Enterprise Systems Division is committed to providing open systems products and technologies for flexible, cost- effective management of computing resources throughout a business enterprise. The company is a major supplier of large-scale mainframe computers, UNIX system software and servers, data storage subsystems, data communications products, applications development software, and a variety of educational and consulting services. Amdahl products are sold in more than 30 countries for use in both open systems and IBM-compatible computing environments.


Note: UTS is a registered trademark and OpenTune, A+UMA, and A+View are trademarks of Amdahl Corporation. UNIX is a registered trademark of X/Open Company, Ltd. SunSoft and Solaris are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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