Here are my notes from August 2, presentation on IBM/DCE by Jonathan
Goldstein.  Send additions or corrections to johnsonj@pobox.

1.  IBM has functioned as an integrator for OSF/DCE.  In the process, they
have focused on quality and performance improvements to the code.

2.  The AIX/DCE model looks as follows:

+----------------------------------------+
| Encina          /  CICS 6000           |
+----------------------------------------+
| Distributed File System                |
+-----------+-----------+------+---------+
| Cell      | X.500     | Time | Security|
| Directory | Directory |      |         |
+-----------+-----------+------+---------+
|  Remote Procedure Call                 |
|         +------------------------------+
|         |  DCE Threads                 |
+---------+------------------------------+
|  AIX/6000 and transport Interfaces     |
+----------------------------------------+

3.  What are the issues to consider in changing file systems? It was
stated that the current quality and performance of DFS is poor.  It will
however, improve over time.  What are the issues in moving from NFS to AFS
to DFS, or from NFS directly to DFS?  Primarily migration issues like,
what will it take to migrate from NFS to AFS, what benefit will moving to
AFS provide, how long do you intend to use AFS before moving to DFS, is it
worth the trouble, as AFS is a difficult implementation.

4.  How interoperable is IBM/DCE?  IBM has tested, and is confident of
interoperablity with the major commercial products (i.e., Transarc, HP).

5.  IBM intends to make DCE pervasive in the market place, by including it
as part of the its operating system.

6.  What impact does IBM/DCE have on system resources?  Most servers are
running with 32 meg of memory.  The RPC's consume a significant amount of
CPU cycles.

7.  When will MVS/DCE be available?  Sometime in 1995, base MVS/DCE
software and RPC interfaces for CICS will be available.  It was stated
that NET-SP (the code that allows single signon) is NOT based on Kerberos.
It is also possible that AIX/DCE may use a security server other than
Kerberos.  Watch for announcements from IETF.

8.  What is the performance of CICS/6000?  Currently it is poor.  The goal
is to improve the performance to the level of current MVS/CICS.

9.  IBM is betting heavily on Object Oriented Technology.  They are
placing an emphasis in areas such as:

- Workplace technologies
- Inter processor transport
- DCE applications development using RPC.

It was specifically stated that parts of DCE, in particular RPC and DFS
are strategic to IBM.

10.  What is XDS - XOM? It is the API for talking to the directory
services.  This API is particularly hard to write to.

11. IBM and HP have recognized that DCE will not catch on in the
commercial market place until performance can be brought up to acceptable
levels.

12.  It appears that the major database vendors are also using a "wait and
see approach" about DCE.  They want to see improved DCE performance and
market demand before integrating DCE into their products.

13.  What is the status of OSF Distributed Management Environment (DME)?
It has been halted.