Fujitsu Siemens Computers recently celebrated the 30th birthday of the successful operating system BS2000.
The first customer delivery took place in 1975, in those days still on a Siemens mainframe of the 7.700 series. Subsequently, the operating system has undergone constant development.
"But what has stayed the same is the consistent orientation to business-critical processes," says Dieter Herzog, Executive Vice-President Enterprise Products, Fujitsu Siemens Computers.
Consequently BS2000 was and still is frequently used as a platform for large OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) applications.
"Our customers are happy to entrust such applications to the BS2000 platform because in this context it is necessary to map complex business processes and provide reliable storage of mission-critical data." For above all the scalability, high availability, security and effective management of the BS2000 platform are still unrivalled today, explains Herzog.
Milestones
A decisive factor for the success of BS2000 was the selection of TSOS (Timesharing Operating System) as a technical basis in the late 60s: With its pioneering concept TSOS was one of the first operating systems which utilised the principles of virtual addressing and a separate, partitioned address space for different users` programs. This established an important foundation for enhancing performance, thus permitting complex and demanding system applications. The continued development of BS2000 was also geared to opening up the most advanced computer technology for customers and to supplying the high operating system performance required for this.
Consequently the follow-up versions brought with them a continuous extension of the performance range and of the security functions, and increased system availability. In 1977 version V3.0 permitted the entry into state-of-the-art computer networking by means of the communication system TRANSDATA, and in 1986 the additive support of the /370 architecture was implemented, increasing the address space by 100%. In 1990 the "Virtual Machine" (VM2000) was introduced for operating multiple BS2000 systems (also of different versions) on one hardware installation, and in 1991 the monolithic system used up till then was subdivided into decoupled subsystems, creating the largest BS2000 version developed so far, V10.0, with more than one million new and modified lines of code. In 1992, with BS2000/OSD (Open Server Dimension) Version 1.0, the system was realigned toward openness for application software.
Functional expansions were also implemented, for example data spaces as an address space extension, ESCON channels for using state-of-the-art peripherals strategies, enhancement of the RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) features, and extended CC automation. A further important milestone was reached in 1997 with the support of HIPLEX architecture. HIPLEX stands for Highly Integrated System Complex and is the concept from Fujitsu Siemens Computers which permits the configuration of an operations, availability and performance cluster comprising multiple BS2000/OSD Business Servers.
In 2002 Fujitsu Siemens Computers continued its consistent strategy of opening up BS2000/OSD by porting the operating system to the SPARC64 architecture.
"Through openness in the processor technology and memory interface technology Fujitsu Siemens Computers is opening up new perspectives for its customers to ensure it will continue to provide powerful platforms for BS2000 applications in all performance sectors in the future," explains Herzog, emphasising the significance of this milestone in the development of the BS2000/OSD Operating System.
BS2000/OSD - Development at a high level
The latest version, BS2000/OSD V6.0, from 2004 is an operating system which is ideally suited to the important features for business-critical computing, such as scalability, availability, security and manageability. In addition to a high level of system efficiency with a typical utilisation level of 75% to 95%, the newest version convinces the user because of the scalability of the processor performance, the potential for integration into corporate SAN concepts via fibre channel technology, and sophisticated automation functions, to name but a few examples. Furthermore the system is able to activate spare and extra CPUs during ongoing operation.
BS2000/OSD V6.0 supports the latest high-end servers S155 and S190 from Fujitsu Siemens Computers which, in terms of performance, partitioning, connectivity and cost-effectiveness, reflect a leading level of development in the /390 server sector.
Fujitsu Siemens Computers is planning a further performance jump in 2006 with its new models in the /390 sector, and parallel to this also a follow-up version of the operating system. In the future version V7.0 the Dynamic Data Centre (DDC) will enable the disk peripherals to be extended from a joint pool of free disks for one or more servers while the system is operating. In a second step this technology will become available not just for BS2000 but also for heterogeneous server environments.
"The BS2000/OSD mainframes are a central module in our Dynamic Data Centre concept," explains Dieter Herzog, Executive Vice-President Enterprise Products, Fujitsu Siemens Computers. "Their sophisticated virtualisation, integration and automation technologies play their part in ensuring that the utilisation of system resources and operating efficiency are unsurpassed. In our TRIOLE strategy we also transfer these technologies which are integrated in BS2000/OSD to other platforms since these technologies are very important in guaranteeing that the IT infrastructures are highly flexible and not very complex. We will carry on developing one of the most successful operating systems for mainframes along these lines and continue the evolution."
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