IBM will this week unveil a tranche of announcements surrounding its AS/400 server systems, including a September 24 shipment date for three new versions of the proprietary architecture AS/400e Model 170 processors which are designed exclusively as Lotus Domino application servers. Other AS/400 announcements slated for Thursday, July 29, will focus on extended PCI support for AS/400, improvements of up to 110% in attached disk performance, Java on AS/400 and extensions to Tivoli support for AS/400.
IBM’s decision to propagate a branch of the AS/400 family tree on which to exclusively hang the Lotus Domino product set is a new departure for the company’s general purpose packaged application server platform. IBM says it is a response to customer demand, citing Lotus statistics which suggest that 28% of US Domino users run the Domino on the AS/400, and IBM sales figures which found that 25% of last year’s first time AS/400 buyers bought it to run the Lotus application.
The exclusive Domino on AS/400 value proposition is expected to include tweaks to Domino that better exploit AS/400 server resources. The three Domino-only models will start at $11,000 for a Model 170 with 256Mb RAM, 4 GB of disk and a RAID 5 controller billed to support 1,300 simple mail users, rising to $22,500 for a two-way machine capable of supporting 4,300 simple mail users.
