IBM, Oracle Go After Wintel Boxes with an i5 520 Solution Edition

Published: July 11, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For a decade, many of us in the OS/400 community have correctly explained to IBM that if it wants AS/400, iSeries, and System i5 to thrive, then it has to compete head-to-head against Microsoft's Windows platform and X86 (and now X64) iron. And it has to use the close affinity the OS/400 platform has with applications to its advantage. Today, IBM and Oracle are launching a new Solution Edition, based on the i5 520 entry server, that the two hope will make i5/OS and the i5 a better competitor to the Wintel combination.

IBM has been selling so-called Solution Edition versions of the OS/400 and i5/OS servers for two years now. With the Solution Edition, IBM offers set configurations of boxes at a reasonable discount to customers who agree to buy particular software from the key independent software vendors in the market. With the J.D. Edwards World and EnterpriseOne (formerly OneWorld) ERP software suites driving more OS/400 platform revenue than any other product--the JDE software still drives about one-eighth of annual System i5 sales, according to IBM sources--you can bet that a reinvigorated IBM and a properly focused Oracle are interested in selling the JDE suites against Wintel alternatives.

Right now, IBM offers three different Solution Editions for the JDE applications. There is an i5 550 Solution Edition just for the EnterpriseOne suite, another somewhat skinnier i5 550 Solution Edition that is aimed at both EnterpriseOne and World, and an even smaller i5 520 Solution Edition that can host either EnterpriseOne or World. (See the links below for details on these machines.) The important thing that you need to know is that those Solution Editions did not have the kind of price point for hardware, operating systems, and database software that made them attractive to customers who would otherwise buy a Wintel box and load it up with Microsoft middleware and databases, perhaps even to run the EnterpriseOne software suite. (Hewlett-Packard and PeopleSoft partnered a few years ago to do just that.) With the new i5 520 Solution Edition announced today--which has the formal and way-too-long name of the IBM System i 520 Solution Edition for Oracle's J.D. Edwards EnterpriseOne--IBM has got the hardware price down to $21,921, including enough memory and disks to support 100 or fewer EnterpriseOne users.

Carter Adkinson, who is System i global sales and business development manager for the Oracle relationship at IBM, says that this offering can absolutely take on Wintel boxes and win. "This is the first time that we have been able to do a total cost of acquisition that is right there with Wintel solutions," he boasts. Because I cannot type that long name, I am simply going to call this box the i5 520 SE for EO (which is still too long of a name, I know). The 520 SE for EO is a 2U server with a single Power5+ core activated and with the full 3,800 CPWs of performance of the machine turned on to support users. It is not a slugged box. And because it is the EnterpriseOne suite, it does not make use of the 5250 protocol, so there is no need to worry about green-screen processing capacity, unlike the RPG-based World suite, which definitely uses green-screen capacity. IBM is offering enough memory to support 100 users on the box, and various disk options to allow companies to build out the solution a bit. (As we go to press, I am still waiting for the exact configuration information of that base box and what the additional disks cost.) The i5 520 SE for EO includes the Virtualization Engine logical partitioning hypervisor that is standard in i5/OS V5R4, and customers who want to carve out a Linux or AIX partition on the machine are allowed to do so, says Adkinson.

With new two-socket servers coming out from Intel based on the reasonably powerful 3 GHz, dual-core "Woodcrest" Xeon DP platform, you might be thinking, How can a single core i5 compete? Well, the trick is capacity planning. Customers who load up a Woodcrest box might have a lot more performance, but if you want to support 100 or fewer users, that performance is not really necessary.

Moreover, if you want to do partitioning on the X64 box, you have to buy VMware's ESX Server 3, which costs thousands of dollars for a two-socket box ($5,750 with all of the features that make it useful, in fact). Equally important in the total cost of ownership equation that is at the heart of any System i competitive bid is that, because of i5/OS's sophisticated workload manager (which is decades old), the EnterpriseOne databases and application servers can be run inside subsystems and therefore isolated from each other without having to resort to logical or physical partitions. (This is what Oracle and IBM call the "all-in-one" configuration.) In the Wintel world, you can use virtual machine partitioning to isolate workloads, but it is not free and it adds another layer of complexity. Windows still does not have a workload manager that can keep applications isolated and peg resources directly to applications, as OS/400 and i5/OS subsystems can and most Unix workload managers can. (This is tricky stuff.) In the Windows world, even among JDE EnterpriseOne customers, companies tend to put the database server on one machine and application servers on multiple machines, even for small numbers of end users. With the i5 520 SE for EO, you can use subsystems within an i5/OS partition and then make use of the other capacity in the box (if you don't use it all) to perhaps run Linux and support infrastructure workloads. And, even more importantly, because you are running on i5/OS, you don't have to become a Windows or Linux security expert and cope with the weekly patch deluge to plug security holes.

The i5 520 SE for EO will be generally available on August 11. IBM's and Oracle's channels will be able to push the box. At $21,921, it is considerably less expensive than the $39,500 price tag of the entry i5 520 Solution Edition for supporting World and EnterpriseOne that was announced last July. (See IBM Tweaks the iSeries Line with Improvements for more on that.)

Adkinson says he does not know if other ISVs will get a similar Solution Edition deal (but it seems likely they will start asking for one today, when they read about the sweet deal Oracle customers are getting) and he adds that IBM has no plans to update the existing Oracle JDE Solution Editions to offer similar aggressive pricing. Still, if you need to support 200, 300, or 400 users on the EnterpriseOne suite, you now have an idea of how low IBM is willing to go on hardware pricing to close a deal. My advice is to reckon what a bigger i5 520 or 550 Solution Edition for EnterpriseOne should cost, and tell your IBM sales rep or business partner to make the same deal available on larger machines. The customer is, after all, always right, right?

In next week's edition of The Four Hundred, after IBM gets me the specs of this box, I will do a side-by-side comparison between this and a Wintel box and see how the math works out.

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