The iSeries line is based on essentially the same Power server chassis as the pSeries Unix server line, with some minor changes for I/O subsystems. The iSeries line has been based on older Power technologies (such as Northstar processors, which are very old by computer standards), but with this week’s revamping, the iSeries line now has the fastest S-Star and Power4 processors that IBM delivers in its Unix servers. (The pSeries line does have faster Power4+ processors, and it is likely to continue to get the fastest chips IBM can deliver for the foreseeable future since the competition is intense in the Unix market and IBM needs to put its best chips forward there.)
While the new iron is interesting, the packaging and pricing is the real issue. First, the product line is a lot less complicated, with fewer machines and fewer software tiers. Second, all but the smallest machines have Capacity Upgrade on Demand utility computing features, and pricing that allows customers to gradually add processing capacity, either permanently or temporarily.
The iSeries is the first server to get this temporary COD capability, and it is at the forefront of the kind of capability that IBM will bring to all of its eServer products and that other manufacturers are going to have to emulate in some fashion, much as they have had to do with partitioning. Although limited pricing information for the new iSeries line is available, the third big change is slashed prices, it looks like IBM has implemented the kind of pricing that its Green Streak 50% price break in late 2002 offered as an incentive to get customers to buy OS/400 servers in a bad economy.
Equally significant, IBM has stopped using so-called interactive feature cards – what the iSeries base calls governors – to restrict the performance of its 5250 green screen terminal protocol, which is the heart of most RPG and Cobol applications installed on the 500,000 AS/400 and iSeries machines in the world. The change may not be as welcomed by the iSeries installed base as many may expect, however. Since 1997, IBM has offered the interactive features that allow customers to gradually step up the amount of CPU capacity that is brought to bear on interactive workloads. Now, interactive capacity is an all-or-nothing proposition.
The new iSeries machines come bundled with a Standard Edition and an Enterprise Edition OS/400 software stack. OS/400 is licensed on a per-processor basis, with the cost of OS/400 for the base number of processors in a machine being bundled into the price of the hardware. The Standard Edition includes OS/400, DB2/400, support for logical partitions (running either Linux or OS/400), WebSphere middleware, Java support, and the ability to run 5250 applications that have been converted to Java applications using IBM’s WebFacing tool (and presumably any other third-party tool that gets around the 5250 screens and its communications protocol).
The Enterprise Edition includes all of that, plus full 5250 software support; in other words, all of the CPW capacity of a machine can be dedicated to 5250 workloads. There are no pricey interactive features that gradually step up the interactive capacity on a machine. The Enterprise Edition of the iSeries-OS/400 bundle also includes a license for WebSphere, Lotus Sametime and Quickplace, DB2 tools, and various Tivoli programs. In the Enterprise Editions for the Model 825, 870, and 890 servers, IBM tosses in a 1.6 GHz Integrated xSeries Server and a bunch of education and services vouchers; with the Model 870 and 890 machines, IBM throws in a free processor activated for Linux. Pricing for the OS/400 Enterprise Edition stack has not been announced yet, but sources tell us that it looks like the Enterprise Edition with full-on 5250 capacity will cost about what half capacity cost on the prior iSeries machines in 2002.
What this means is that customers who might only need a small amount of 5250 capacity and who need lots of raw server capacity to run batch jobs or web or client/server workloads (which do not make use of the 5250 protocol) are going to end up paying a lot more for that 5250 capacity. They will get all of it in one fell swoop, and they will have servers that cost a lot less, too. So IBM hasn’t taken without giving something. It will take time to see if there is a net gain for most customers.
Source: Computerwire
