SSG Relaunches Fast400 Governor Buster for OS/400 Servers

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Fast400 4.1 took a bit more time to come to market than anticipated, says Colin Wells, who is managing the Fast400 product for SSG, because the developers behind the Fast400 tool wanted to make sure that it works--and will continue to work--as IBM tries to undermine Fast400 and other possible so-called "patched" programs for OS/400. Since Fast400 burst on the scene last year, IBM has been putting patches into OS/400 to try to defeat Fast400. Wells says that his team of coders is confident that they can keep pace with whatever IBM throws at them, and is so confident that they actually gave IBM a copy of Fast400 to play with as a gesture. I said it was a gesture. I didn't say it was a polite gesture, as this is a pretty cheeky move.

So is the following statement by SSG: "Certain PTFs may contain code designed to circumvent technological measures in place to prevent tampering with Fast400's ability to function correctly. In keeping with the spirit of IBM's eLiza project, Fast400 is 'self-healing' and 'self-adjusting,' and so Fast400 automatically detects if such PTFs have been applied, and adjusts accordingly. If you apply a new PTF, you may have to download the latest version of Fast400."

You can't accuse SSG of not having a sense of humor, especially considering SSG's U.S. offices are about 800 yards down the road on Highway 52 North in Rochester, Minnesota. (Yes, that is precisely where the iSeries labs and factories are.) SSG is based in the Isle of Man, an island in the Irish Sea between England and Ireland. SSG won't say who its secret coders are. But the company says that Fast400 4.1 will work well with OS/400 V4R4, V4R5, and V5R1 running on any RISC-based server model in the iSeries or AS/400 product lines. This time around, SSG is even going so far as to tell the whole world how Fast400 works: "When your jobs perform workstation I/O, a bit is set in a field within the description of each such job, marking the job as using interactive CPW. Depending on your PTF level, Fast400 simply clears these bits periodically or makes them invisible to the system." This is very cheeky, indeed.

What we have been told in the past is that Fast400 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 overall processor performance within an AS/400 or iSeries machine can be applied to green-screen workloads. The so-called interactive hardware features that IBM sells for big bucks in the Northstar, Pulsar, I-Star, S-Star and Power4 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. These cards can cost thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars, depending on the OS/400 server.

SSG has simplified the licensing model for the Fast400, compared with the graduated pricing scheme for perpetual software licenses used by the former marketer of the product, TigerTools. SSG is charging $1,000 per processor per year for a Fast400 license that is not perpetual, but rather a subscription. SSG is also offering a trial download of Fast400, which is available at www.fast400.net, that allows companies to evaluate the program from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m., rather than providing a key code that runs for a month or two unrestricted. (This is also a clever alternative on trial software.) Companies that want to upgrade to a version of Fast400 can pay for it and then get a key that activates the trial version for full use. Wells also says that there is a mechanism in place for companies that have prior versions of Fast400 distributed by TigerTools, which has key codes that run out at the end of May.