The latest enhancements to the AS/400 line were announced yesterday with the key developments in network file-serving, and storage. Particularly noteworthy is a new tape library that will also work with the RS/6000 Unix boxes and IBM ES/9000 enterprise systems. But first the three new machines. All sit at the low end of the current AS/400 range and are specifically built for file serving with modified hardware that mean that users can neither upgrade to them from other AS/400 models, or upgrade from them to other AS/400s. IBM has chosen to highlight these differences by breaking naming conventions and junking the F prefix: the smallest is simply called the Server 9402 Model 100. The other, bigger, boxes are the 9404 models 135 and 140. The models are said to have power quite disproportional to the 9402 or 9404 equivalent models, but only – and IBM underlines this three times, in red ink – when it comes to local network protocols, file sharing and that kind of thing – try and use them for conventional AS/400 work and you will be in for a disappointment. The only exception to this rule is that the new models are also well suited to compute-intensive work. Because of the file-serving bent only seven 5250 terminals or printers can be attached to a machines directly and all the rest must be local network connections. Though there were no comparative benchmarks at yesterday’s announcements, the company said that the Model 100 should support around 100 programmers and 10 to 25 users, the Model 135 10 to 20 programmers and 25 to 50 users and the model 140 more than 20 programmers and 50 to 100 users, network-connected. At an early briefing last month the company was more forthcoming, suggested that as a local network servers, the Model 100 will offer three times the performance of the smallest 9402 machine, with the 315 giving three times the power of an F10 and the Model 140 five times that of an F20. The machines have also had their maximum disk capacities bumped up to 47Gb and main storage raised to 512Mb. IBM says that the improvements have been made by throwing hardware at the problem, but further improvements to networking performance are promised through software improvements next year: with APPC software performance inproved three-fold, TCP/IP eight times faster than before, SQL queries running 20% faster and file serving up to 6 times faster. The Model 100 plus operating system costs UKP15,944; the Model 135 costs UKP28,698; and the Model 140, UKP59,382. The new 3494 Tape Library, designed an built by IBM, can hold anything from 210 and 3,040 tape cartridges depending on how many drive and storage units are slotted together. This represents uncompressed storage capacity of 168Gb to 2.4Tb (504Gb to 7.2Tb compressed). The library can be shared by up to eight systems – but only four can be AS/400s. One very nice twist is that users with the more recent AS/400 3490E cartridge drivers will be able to upgrade to the tape library simply by slipping their existing devices into the new cabinets. No prices were given. The last major hardware addition is nine new models of 9337 Disk Array Subsystem – there are now 15 models. The basis for the new boxes are three pieces of new technology. The first is higher performance 542Mb and 970Mb disks and the second a new controller within the 9337 which incorporates a 1Mb solid state write cache, the ability to switch disks between conventional and RAID configurations and to address up to 16 disks with one card. The final piece in the puzzle is a new RISC-based input-output adaptor card with a 20Mbps throughput compared to 5Mbps. Combining these new pieces in var ious ways gives the nine new mod els, which at the upper end will outperform anything else that peo ple can buy says UK AS/400 brand manager Malcolm Haines. The new models aside, all existing AS/400 models also get a few extra feat ures: including a LocalTalk work station adaptor which enable Apple Macintoshes to be used as terminals or the console, and a new 2.048Mbps communication adaptors. All the F series 9404 models can
now directly attach to 360 terminals and all they can now all handle up to 19.7Gb of disk storage. The 9406 models have had both their main and disk storage capacities increased.
