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Fast400 OS/400 Governor Buster May Re-Emerge This Week
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
The TigerTools Web site may not be up anymore, but its email server is still working. TigerTools, I am sure you all remember, is the marketing company that was formed last year to launch the Fast400 OS/400 governor buster. The techies behind the tool, whose identities have not been revealed, chose a UK company called Storage Solutions Group, to take over the marketing of Fast400 in late November 2001. An email sent by TigerTools on behalf of Storage Solutions last week says it will re-launch the product this week.
The email, which was sent by Colin Wells--presumably the chief operating officer of Storage Solutions and whom I have mistakenly identified as John Wells in past issues of The Four Hundred-- indicated that Storage Solutions would launch a new Web site to support and market Fast400. The Web site would also include a phone number that would be answered directly by Wells, who has been very quiet for the past few months as the furor over the Fast400 tool dies down a little. Wells says that the new version of Fast400 will work with the latest OS/400 cumulative PTF releases (although he did not say what OS/400 versions would be supported). The email also provided a key code to ensure that Fast400 installs keep working until May 2002. Presumably all TigerTools customers have this key code already, since they got the same email that I did.
Incidentally, we do not use Fast400 on our AS/400, and I am on the Fast400 mailing list to be kept appraised of what TigerTools and Storage Solutions are up to. As I have expressed in past articles on Fast400 in The Four Hundred and in other midrange publications I have been writing in since IBM first started using governors in the AS/400 line in 1993, I abhor Big Blue's practice of tuning AS/400 and iSeries hardware to suit its needs rather than just shipping a box that runs as fast as it can on any workload. I understand why IBM did it, but there had to be a better way. I think that tools like Fast400 are an inevitable consequence of IBM's technical trickery and pricing practices, and if the nightmare of having a product like Fast400 on the market will make IBM wake up and change the way it treats OS/400 shops--the Ghost of Governors Past and Future--then I think this nightmare is a good one. I also concede there are ethical and legal issues involved in using products like Fast400, and these are issues that every AS/400 and iSeries shop has to face on its own.
In early December, IBM threatened that it would devise ways to disable the Fast400 governor buster, and it made good on that promise by releasing two HIPER PTFs that disable Fast400 on OS/400 V5R1 and V4R5. For the past several months, many of the PTFs I have looked at have included warnings that say they will affect "patched programs," which is IBM's language for describing what Fast400 is.
Fast400 could come out from Storage Solutions under a different brand and with different capabilities that are more amenable to IBM and its business partners. The original Fast400, to put it simply, tricks OS/400 into thinking that interactive workloads on AS/400 and iSeries servers are batch jobs, thereby circumventing a special program called CFINT within OS/400 that acts like a governor of green-screen application performance. CFINT determines how much interactive performance within an AS/400 or iSeries machine can be applied to green-screen workloads. Fast400 is aimed at Apache and Northstar SXX generation AS/400 machines, as well as the Northstar 7XX and Pulsar/I-Star/S-Star 8XX machines. It also works on Apache and Northstar Model 150 and Model 170 servers, Northstar Model 250 servers, and Pulsar/I-Star/S-Star Model 270 servers.
It has been my contention for years that the so-called interactive hardware features that IBM sells for big bucks in the Northstar, Pulsar, I-Star, and S-Star generations of AS/400 and iSeries servers are nothing more than cards that tell CFINT how CPU resources can be applied to the 5250 protocol. IBM has never admitted this, of course, but it doesn't make it any less true. I knew it was true from looking at the specs of AS/400 and iSeries servers, and Fast400 is the final demonstration of the truth: if OS/400 didn't have governors, then how could Fast400 work at all? Why would someone go through the trouble of launching a product and invoking the wrath of IBM's marketeers and lawyers if there was no truth to it?
Round two of this saga looks like it will be starting next week. If Storage Solutions does a relaunch, I'll give you the inside scoop on exactly what the company is up to and what countermeasures we can expect from IBM.
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