W H A T   I S   T P F ?

IBM's Transaction Processing Facility (TPF) has been the "high volume transaction processing" (HVTP) platform of choice for many of IBM's largest customers for many years. These customers cover several industries, including airlines, lodging, finance, health, and travel.

TPF's unique capabilities have enabled one customer to run over 5,200 messages per second and the majority of customers to operate at 99.9-100 percent availability for sustained periods of time (one customer has run nearly two years without any planned or unplanned outages).

In addition to high volume and high availability, TPF customers have begun to see several new enhancements to open systems connectivity and applications development:

Using MPIF/6000 (a Travel Industry Solutions Offering), RS/6000 and SP2 processors running AIX have a high-speed application programming interface (API) to existing TPF applications and capability.

TPF customers can develop applications using the ISO-C programming language.TCP/IP connectivity is available using the IBM 3172 and the TPF SOCKETS/CLAW interface.

In plan is an integrated application development environment through tools like the IBM Visual Age for C/C++ Family of Products. Joint development is nearly complete between a customer and IBM to create applications which use TPF as the Object Repository server in a multi-tiered client/server environment.