Four Hundred Special Report 2006--What Will Be Shaking with the iSeries in 2006?

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Volume 14, Number 50 -- December 14, 2005

What Will Be Shaking with the iSeries in 2006?

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As most of us know, IBM has a new release of the i5/OS operating system--Version 5 Release 4--coming out some time in 2006. Beyond admitting this, Big Blue has been pretty quiet in the past year about what it has cooking for the iSeries product line in the future, beyond the hints it has offered to me in past years. But, because the company knows that you have to talk about the future if you expect people to follow you there, about this time every year the people from Rochester and Somers are kind enough to talk about the future with me.

I spoke to Jim Herring, director of iSeries product management and business operations; Chip McClellan, IBM's senior marketing manager for market segments; and Peter Bingaman, vice president of marketing for the iSeries line. The rumor mill and then Herring has already given us a sneak peek at some of the features in i5/OS V5R4, so I am not going to get into these features again. (If you want to know about these, see the Related Stories section at the end of this article.) And, as I said in the December 5 edition of The Four Hundred, no one seems to be sure if i5/OS will be announced in January, February, or March, and the IBMers I spoke with above had no intention of spoiling the surprise. The gradually coalescing expectation is that the i5/OS announcement will be in January, with shipments following perhaps in February or March. What can be said for certain, based on past i5/OS releases, is that the code has long since been frozen and is almost certainly ready to rock. The announcement timing is more of a sales and marketing issue than anything else. If i5/OS is not tied directly to any particular piece of new hardware or some external event--like the COMMON midrange user group meeting in Minneapolis at the end of March 2006, then it makes no sense to wait to announce it. Hence the expectation for an announcement in January.

There has been a lot of talk about the Power5+ processors that the pSeries machines just got in some entry and midrange boxes, but as I have said in past issues of this newsletter, the performance gains from Power5+ compared to Power5 are just not that great--about 15 percent, core for core. This is certainly not enough to justify the hassle of redoing the product line, adding new features, educating the resellers, sales force, and customers. If IBM wanted to use the new Power5+ quad-core modules (QCMs), which jam two dual-core Power5+ chips into a single server socket, in the i5 550 and i5 570, that might be interesting, since it adds a lot more oomph even though the clock speeds are geared down from 1.9 GHz to 1.5 GHz on these Power5+ chips because of heating issues.

"Things are really not changing all that much in 2006," explains Herring. "We're extremely happy with the products we have in terms of form factor, performance, and features." That sure doesn't sound like IBM wants to jam Power5+ into the iSeries. But for marketing reasons--particularly among customers who may want to have more logical partitions or faster engines--IBM may be forced to adopt the Power5+ in the i5 line. (I am not sure, but I believe the QCMs should allow twice as many logical partitions per machine as the DCMs.) But because IBM prices i5/OS on a per-core basis, there would not be much of a savings in this approach. In fact, the CPW rating for those cores would be lower and therefore the cost per CPW for the software would be higher on the QCMs than on two DCMs. If IBM shifted to per-socket pricing on i5/OS V5R4 and rolled out the software on the QCMs, that would be a very interesting development. I wouldn't hold my breath.

But it does bring up a point. The whole IT industry is gradually coming to the realization that core counts are not necessarily the best way to price systems software. Even Oracle gives price discounts on dual-core processors (multiply the core count by 0.75 and then round up to the nearest whole number for the processor count). And just last week, Oracle cut Sun Microsystems a break Sun and said on the new "Niagara" Sparc T1 processor, which has eight cores in a single socket, it would use a 0.25 multiplication factor on the cores, which means that each Niagara chip counts like two cores. Considering that each core does about as much work as a two-way Xeon server, this seems fair. But core counts and other things--like adjunct processing--are going to change, and software makers like Oracle are going to have to either have pricing structures that are so complex they can't understand them or they are going to have to come up with some other measurement. IBM could lead here with i5/OS by pricing by socket, but it seems unlikely.

In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about iSeries blade servers, but the Power5 and Power5+ chips do not really engender themselves to blade packaging, and the PowerPC 970 processors used in the BladeCenter blade servers do not support the special memory tags required for the single-level storage used in OS/400 and i5/OS. "I don't see us doing an i5/OS blade any time soon," says Herring. "The i5/OS operating system and the way customers use it do not make sense for blades." So blade servers are pretty much out, possibly until the Power6 servers debut.

And by that time, for all we know, all of IBM's servers may use blade-style packaging, putting processors, memory, I/O, and special assist processors on separate blades that plug into a high-speed backplane. Such a design would allow CPU, memory, and I/O to scale independently of each other, unlike now, where each cell board in a Power5 server has its own dedicated capacities for these features. Other server vendors are moving in this direction in the supercomputing market, and I think eventually this is how servers will be built.

But in the meantime, IBM is just as happy to be selling rack-mounted, fairly dense servers. Herring says that IBM was surprised to see that not quite half of the iSeries servers it is now shipping go out in a rack-mounted form factor. Up until the "Squadron" i5 server launch last summer, IBM only sold iSeries tower servers, which did not offer dense packaging at all. To those of us in the industry who kept telling IBM to get rack-mounted machines out the door, since this is how midrange and enterprise customers consume servers, that run rate for rack i5 servers is not surprising at all.

What IBM does intend to focus on in 2006 is software, and not just i5/OS V5R4, which will be the focal point of IBM's plans. According to Herring, services-oriented architecture (SOA) application development is going to be a focus area over the next two years, not just because independent software vendors will start coding software using the SOA approach, but because the vast number of iSeries shops have homegrown code that also needs to be refitted for the SOA world. One of the neat new capabilities that is coming with V5R4 is the ability to take RPG artifacts and wrap them in Web services, says Herring; up until now, to componentize RPG applications, you had to put a Java wrapper around the RPG. Now, you would have to. Herring won't say what this capability will be called, but he did say that IBM would be working with partners to accomplish this feat.

Bingaman and McClellan say that IBM will be working with iSeries ISVs to not only take better advantage of the mixed operating system capabilities of the iSeries--which can run i5/OS, Linux, and AIX natively and Windows on internal and external X86 servers--as well as helping ISVs work together to integrate their software into a more complete solution for very specific sets of customers. As an example, Bingaman described an integrated solution in the casino industry based on the Lodging Management Systems from Agilysis, accounting software from SSA Global, slot machine management software from Bally Systems, and point-of-sale terminal management software from InfoGenesis. Bingaman says that the iSeries used to have 100 percent of the casinos on the Las Vegas strip as customers, but that the Wynn Casino, ominously enough, went with an all-Windows platform. (You would expect that, based on the name, right?) Anyway, McClellan says that these ISVs are collectively "feeling a lot of pressure from Microsoft" and that they want to "present a united front" to the customer and sell a complete casino management solution. (The InfoGenesis Revelation POS management suite actually runs on Windows.) The idea is to take integration--the hallmark of the iSeries--up a notch and get ISVs to play together to win more deals. This is a logical and sensible thing to do. "The days of the monolithic IT architecture are long since over," says Bingaman, who adds that 95 percent of iSeries shops today have another kind of server--generally Windows, but increasingly Unix and Linux--in their shop. IBM is looking at other industries--particularly in wholesale distribution, banking and finance, and manufacturing--where it can create similar cross-ISV and sometimes cross-platform solutions that end up running entirely on an iSeries. Another interesting idea is to put Voice over IP (VoIP) and banking applications on an iSeries, plus a BladeCenter-based virtual PC infrastructure connected by iSCSI links (which is due next year) to the iSeries and by normal networking and thin clients to end users.

By taking this approach to integration, the iSeries can get a lot bigger piece of the IT pie at companies. Perhaps as much as twice as much as it currently gets, since IBM says that spending on basic infrastructure workloads is anywhere from one to two times as big as the spending on industry-specific, back office solutions. Compliance, security, Web/print/file serving, VoIP, digital video, and other infrastructure workloads are the obvious targets.

Wouldn't it be nice to see the iSeries business go back up above $3 billion in sales again? (That's my possible projection for the next two years, not IBM's.) While not being specific about numbers like that--the Securities and Exchange Commission and IBM Corporate frown on that sort of thing--these IBMers clearly think that the time has come again for the iSeries, and that the market has moved in its direction. And they are thinking hard about how to tap its inherent integration and acting intelligently to try to make it happen with the help of iSeries ISVs who need an easier sell and customers who want to move to new technologies.

This may not be as easy to talk about as faster chips or a new operating system release, but if the iSeries can keep building momentum, that makes for a pretty damned good story, too. And I will be happy to write it when--not if--it happens.