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IBM's July iSeries Announcements, Part Deu

Number 28 - July 18, 2005 - IT Jungle

IBM made some iSeries announcements on July 12, and I outlined the major ones in last week's issue of Four Hundred Stuff, which included a new i5 520 Solution Edition, new models in the i5 520 line, more sensible pricing for i5/OS licenses on the i5 570, and new per-processor pricing on Software Maintenance for the i5 line. IBM did a lot of little things, too, which I will discuss below.

On the hardware front, IBM is boosting the maximum disk capacity of the i5 line for each model and is also increasing the number of I/O towers and drawers that can be attached to each server as well. The doubling of maximum disk capacity is being done on all Power5-based servers, and is enabled through the use of new 141 GB disk drives. So the maximum arm counts remain the same for each server model. An i5 520 tops out at 39 TB, an i5 550 at 77 TB, an i5 570 at 193 TB, and an i5 595 at 381 TB.

IBM is also boosting the I/O tower and drawer counts on the i5 570 and 595 due to customer requests, which is being done predominantly because logical partitions require their own I/O towers and customers with lots of partitions were running out of towers and drawers. In theory, the expanded number of towers could be used to boost disk capacity, but there are not a lot of servers in the world that need a few hundred terabytes of capacity--OS/400-based or otherwise. This is a huge amount of data. The i5 520 still has a maximum of six I/O drawers/towers and the i5 550 still has up to 12. But IBM has boosted the number of drawers/towers from 30 up to 48 in the i5 570 and from 60 up to 72 on the i5 595.

Further on the hardware front, IBM says the new xSeries 460, the biggest X86/X64 server IBM has ever created, can be attached to the iSeries through the Integrated xSeries Adapter (IxA) card now. The xSeries 460 is based on Big Blue's "Hurricane" chipset, and it can be used in a four-way configuration and then scaled all the way up to 32-way processing. (And when dual-core Xeons come out, those processor counts will double.) The xSeries 460 uses Intel's new 64-bit "Potomac" Xeon MP processors. (To find out more about these machines, see "IBM Launches Promised 32-Way Intel Server" from The Linux Beacon).

IBM also announced last week that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 has now been certified to run Integrated xSeries Server co-processors and on externally attached xSeries servers linking to the iSeries through the IxA cards. Red Hat announced RHEL 4 in March, and now it has been certified on these iSeries X86/X64 co-processors. Customers have to be running OS/400 V5R2 or i5/OS V5R3 to run RHEL 4 on these xSeries gear when used cooperatively with an iSeries. Novell's SUSE Enterprise Linux 8 and 9 releases are only certified to run on the IxA-xSeries combinations because SUSE's install program requires a floppy device, which the iSeries does not have. (Yes, this is silly.)

i5/OS V5R3 Enhancements
IBM also made a few enhancements to the i5/OS V5R3 operating system. The first one will eventually affect all iSeries customers, but for now it is only affecting customers in the United States. IBM said last week it would provide an interface so customers could order software upgrades for their iSeries and pSeries customers that allows them to order tweaks for i5/OS and the licensed program products for i5/OS through the Internet. This will simplify and speed up the laborious task of ordering upgrades. The software upgrades are still distributed on CD or tape, however, and it is not offered instantaneously over the Internet. Someday, IBM may offer online distribution of upgrades. The system IBM has created to order upgrades can be accessed by either the customer or their business partner and by account or machine serial number. You do not have to do an eConfig report and ship it to IBM to do your upgrades, either, since IBM has created an automated software entitlement checking system for this portal. The Entitled Software Support portal, as this service is called, has 24x7 support by telephone and online. The portal is located at https://www-5.ibm.com/servers/eserver/ess/OpenServlet.wss, and it is active now although IBM's announcement said it would be available starting July 22.

IBM also said that this week customers will be able to download the new Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 inside the Java Development Kit 1.5. The tweaks to Java are made through i5/OS (5722-SS1) Option 7. The updated Java has support for generics (an enhancement to the Java system that allows a type or method to operate on objects of various types while providing compile-time type safety, according to IBM), an autoboxing/unboxing feature, typesafe enums, a loop construct, as well as changes in the base Java libraries to beef up security and support Unicode 4.0. The Java update also includes a new feature called the Java Virtual Machine Tool Interface, which allows developers, administrators, and automated system management tools to inspect the state of a Java application running inside a Java Virtual Machine and to control the execution of that application inside the JVM. Because this is all very technical material, the gurus over at our Four Hundred Guru newsletter will be poring over the enhancements and describing what they are to the people who really care about this level of detail: programmers.

IBM also said last week that it was taking out the WebSphere Portal Express Plus software it has been bundling in the i5/OS Enterprise and Solution Editions and replacing it with the new WorkPlace Services Express (WSE) software that it just announced. WSE will be installed on i5 550, 570, and 595 machines running i5/OS Enterprise Edition and on i5 550 machines running i5/OS Solution Edition. The i5 520 machines running i5/OS Value, Express, Standard, or Enterprise Edition will continue to ship as they did prior to this announcement--with WebSphere Express and sometimes the portal. The WorkPlace Services Express software bundled on the i5s includes instant messaging, team spaces, document management, and a portal. Customers can license it on a per-user or a per-processor basis. This change is not retroactive, which means only companies buying a new i5 will get WSE and those who already bought an i5 will not have a freebie version of WSE that they are entitled to. At least not officially. But as I have always said, if you make enough noise and spend enough money on an ongoing basis, IBM will take care of you.

In discussing the July 12 announcements, Ian Jarman, product manager for the iSeries line, reiterated to me something that IBM has stressed for a while, which is that the company will not make any big changes to the iSeries line in terms of hardware this year, and that no big software changes will hit until i5/OS V5R4 is launched in 2006. The rumor mill suggests that i5/OS V5R4 will hit either just before or during the spring COMMON iSeries user group meeting.

But IBM could move the announcement ahead if it has a compelling marketing reason. No one outside of IBM has a really good handle on what features will be in the V5R4 release, and we don't expect any hints until the fall COMMON show in Orlando this September. I happen to think that V5R4 is really about testing whatever microcode and kernel changes have been made to the operating system for supporting the future Power5+ and Power6 processors. IBM has done this maneuver in the past, and such new code would be transparent to the users as well as backwards compatible on Power4, Power4+, and Power5 servers. I have a feeling that V5R4 will not run on anything earlier than that. Sources at IBM has said little else about V5R4 except that it will have user interface, clustering, and database enhancements and will have lots of tweaks that customers have been clamoring for. IBM has also said that the release after V5R4--presumably called i6/OS V6R1, but maybe not--would not be tied to any particular hardware announcement.

Ascential Integration on the iSeries through AIX
Here's an announcement you will not find in the customer letters or in the presentations from the July 12 announcements, but it happened nonetheless. IBM is in the process of acquiring Ascential Software, the other half of the Informix database company it did not acquire and the half that was interested in pursuing the data replication and enterprise integration market by its lonesome. IBM wants the money that Ascential was going to make in this area, despite the fact that it is competing against many of its partners. And it has been certifying some Ascential products on its servers, including the iSeries.

Last week, in fact, IBM said that WebSphere DataStage 7.5.1A, WebSphere QualityStage 7.5, and WebSphere ProfileStage 7.5.1--the new IBM names for Ascential products--have been certified to run on the iSeries within AIX-based logical partitions. DataStage is the data integration engine that companies would use to, for example, link a set of data culled from ERP applications to a data warehouse. ProfileStage is a tool that is used to create the extract-test-load profiles for data culling, and QualityStage is a used to validate and scrub that data after it is extracted from those ERP systems and before it is loaded into the data warehouse.