by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Most of the announcements that IBM will make this week have already been reported on at length in the past two issues of The Four Hundred. But there are a few twists and turns in the announcements that IBM will make on August 28 that are a little different from what the rumor mill was expecting.

IBM has a few little announcements to make in the iSeries line later this year, but this will pretty much be it for 2001. IBM has yet to announce a 36 GB disk drive for the iSeries line and has yet to deliver 15K RPM disk drives of any capacity for the line, and it may not do that until next year. IBM is confident that it can deliver Power4-based "Regatta" machines in production by late November or early December in the pSeries line of AIX and Linux servers (more on those machines and what the iSeries version of Regatta might look like next week), and is expected to make iSeries versions of the machine available sometime next year. The speculation is that IBM will try to launch the machines with OS/400 V5R2 in May or June, but IBM is not in any particular hurry, with V5R1 still new and the S-Star processors delivering more than enough bang for most customers. Regatta iSeries servers may not make their debut until well in the second half, in fact, since IBM has 668 MHz and 750 MHz S-Star processors on tap to provide upgrade options for current iSeries customers in each of the Model 270, 820, 830, and 840 groups. No one has said IBM will do any of this, and my sources are adamant that IBM is seeking to minimize the number of times that it updates iSeries hardware because changes here and there, as opposed to a complete product revamp every 12 to 18 months, seem to make it more difficult for IBM and its business partners to resell iSeries equipment. The kind of churn in the Wintel and Unix server markets, which is driven by intense competition where power and price/performance are the only things that matter, screws up the iSeries sales channel.

With that in mind, the one thing that IBM will not announce this week is processor upgrades for the iSeries Model 270 or 8XX servers using either the 668 MHz or 750 MHz S-Star processors, as I speculated might happen in last week's issue. IBM will next week debut an eight-way pSeries server using 750 MHz S-Star chips, something that will allow it to put a machine in the field that can compete handsomely against the eight-way RISC-Unix servers from Sun Microsystems and Hewlett Packard. The fastest eight-way Sun can field, a Sun Fire 3800 using 750 MHz UltraSparc-III processors, can handle about 75,000 transactions per minute on the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark test by my estimates. (Sun has yet to announce TPC-C results for its midrange line.) The HP N4000, with eight 550 MHz PA-8600 processors, can process a little over 60,000 TPM on the TPC-C test, and a model with 750 MHz PA-8700 processors would do around 80,000 TPM. However, an eight-way IBM pSeries with 750MHz S-Star processors is expected to break the 100,000 TPM barrier, giving IBM a big lead on Sun and HP as we enter what would normally be the busy server buying season, were the economy not soft around the world.

What IBM is announcing is that the microcode upgrades for the "Bumblebee" Dedicated Servers for Domino that IBM had promised to make, which allow for WebSphere and Java to run full-tilt-boogie on the boxes, would be made ahead of schedule. (This is probably what my sources were confused about when they said that IBM was making hardware enhancements.) In any event, this enhanced integration with Java and Domino on the Bumblebees will be generally available on September 28 to customers with existing Bumblebees. This enhancement is only available through the latest build of OS/400 V5R1, and customers with V5R1 have to do a slip install to activate these enhancements. (A slip install means you literally install the new V5R1 over top of the old V5R1, with all of your applications and settings remaining in place. A scratch install of V5R1 would mean starting from an empty machine, building the operating system, and then adding archived applications.)

As I reported last week, Lotus Sametime 2.5, a complete revamp of the voice, video and chat software, will be ready for OS/400 during the fourth quarter. IBM will also be talking up the iNotes Web Access client and the iSeries Access for the Web client, a light-weight client program that will be distributed as part of the Client Access family of products. IBM will also be bundling in WebSphere Host Publisher 3.5 in the Client Access product line. Host Publisher is a screen scraping program developed at IBM's Raleigh, North Carolina, PC software development labs.

IBM will also this week make a number of I/O related announcements, many of which are designed to get customers to use the high-bandwidth High Speed Link (HSL) I/O enhancements IBM has created for the iSeries line. IBM will this week announce optical HSL connections between servers and remote I/O that can be as much as 250 meters long, which is considerably longer than the 15 meter copper HSL cables IBM announced last April. The optical HSL cables will be available on October 12. IBM also tweaked how some I/O towers so they support HSL connections to iSeries servers rather than the AS/400's slower SPD links. In particular, IBM will announce that the feature 5065 and 5076 SPD-attached PCI I/O towers can be converted to HSL-attached PCI towers, which will go by the name of features 5074 and 5079. IBM will also allow customers with Model 820 servers to buy a smaller feature 5075 HSL/PCI I/O tower and convert it to a more expensive and capacious feature 5074 HSL/PCI I/O tower. Up until now, Model 820 customers had to choose between buying the cheaper tower or laying out extra cash at the front end of a Model 820 acquisition so they would have expansion room down the road. No word on what these I/O tower conversions will cost; both conversions are expected to be available on September 7. Finally, IBM will announce that Model 8XX servers and PCI I/O towers can now be equipped with two power cords, so that if one is accidentally disconnected, the server and I/O do not crash.

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Lakeview Technology has announced a special deal, which runs until the end of the year, that offers customers who buy certain products in the MIMIX family of high availability line significant discounts if they hop to it and start buying these programs now. The deal is targeted specifically at first-time buyers of MIMIX software, not companies who already have deployed high availability programs.

Under the terms of the deal, which is called the MIMIX 2 For The Price of 1 Promotion, first-time high availability customers who buy and install the MIMIX Replicator program for an iSeries or AS/400 logical partition will get MIMIX Monitor and MIMIX Promoter for free. MIMIX Monitor is the real-time mirroring monitor portion of the MIMIX suite, and MIMIX Promoter allows applications to continue running during database reorganizations or application upgrades that normally require AS/400 or iSeries applications to be temporarily shut down. Not to be picky, but MIMIX Replicator consists of two programs--MIMIX DB2 Replicator for replicating information between databases stored on different machines or different partitions, and MIMIX Object Replicator for replicating all other types of OS/400 files. So the deal is, technically speaking, actually four for the price of two, or three for the price of one, depending on how you want to look at it. In any event, the discounts come to 50 percent of the total cost of the programs, and that is what is important. None of the midrange high availability software vendors provide list prices for their products, so it is hard to say how much money buyers stand to save from this deal.

by Joe Hertvik

IBM is scheduled to release the first official Client Access Express for Windows V5R1 (Express Client) service pack on August 29. IBM had previously released another Express Client V5R1 SP, SI01037, in May, but that service pack was a holdover from when the product was in beta. The new service pack, SI01907, will contain fixes for the following Express Client components:

* Express required programs

* AS/400 Operations Navigator

* Data Transfer, ODBC, and the OLE DB Provider

* 5250 Display and Printer Emulation

* AS/400 Operations Console

Once SI01907 is installed, you will need to install corresponding OS/400 Host PTFs to get Management Central (MC) to function properly. These PTFs must be installed to the central OS/400 system and to all endpoint OS/400 systems controlled by the central system. The Readmesp.txt file that comes with SI01907 contains more information on how to find and install the proper PTFs.

by Joe Hertvik

As part of this week's iSeries announcements, IBM will be releasing a new version of its Connect for iSeries (iSeries Connect) middleware. First delivered in June, iSeries Connect is a modified version of the company's MQ Series middleware that is tailored for B2B software integration. iSeries Connect V1.1 will include the following enhancements:

* Support for the latest versions of Ariba's Commerce XML (cXML) and Metiom's mXML trading partner protocols.

* Open interfaces that allow business partners to create their own trading protocols in support of point-to-point and private exchanges.

* Integration with WebSphere Commerce Suite V4.1 and V5.1. This support is provided for OS/400 V5R1 users running WebSphere Application Server V3.5 or above and MQ Series V5.2.

* Better integration with OS/400 back-end systems through the iSeries Flow Manager component, including the ability to allow multiple back-end application or database calls to be made from a single trading partner request.

* Enhancements to the Business Processor Editor tool to improve Application Connector Document (ACD) and multi-step Process Flow Models (PFM) creation. ACDs and PFMs are the components that provide information about the target back-end application and its connector type, the format of data expected by the application, and how to map an incoming transaction request to a particular application's connector.

* New catalog features to create and publish subsets of a catalog for buyer-specific categorization and customer-specific pricing. Catalogs can now be generated from multiple databases.

iSeries Connect V1.1 is scheduled for general availability on August 31. Pricing information on the new release was not available as we went to press.

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the August 13 edition of The Four Hundred, I outlined the latest salary survey trends in the AS/400 and iSeries market put together by Nate Viall & Associates. Having delved a little deeper into his statistics, Viall has come to the conclusion that bonuses are on the rise at OS/400 shops, both in terms of the percent of people reporting that they have received a bonus and the amount of that bonus. This trend is valid for both managers and programmers at OS/400 shops.

As I explained two weeks ago, the conventional wisdom has been that the Y2K crisis was the main driver of bonus giving at these companies. Because it can take months or years to rebuild skills in a new manager or programmer that are directly relevant to a business, many companies have figured out that it is easier to make what were once Y2K bonuses permanent salary increases and to keep MIS staff in lockstep with other valued managers and workers so they don't take flight. That's been the thinking anyway. But after having gone back and analyze the last decade's worth of salary information, Viall has come to the conclusion that the practice of giving bonuses actually started in 1995, a few years before the Y2K hiring craze took off, and they are continuing to accelerate 18 months after we got through the Y2K transition. It seems that Y2K accelerated the practice of giving raises at OS/400 shops, and may have even contributed to increases in the amounts of those raises. But Y2K was not the cause. In analyzing the trend information from even the past three to four months, Viall has seen bonuses for both managers and programmers growing as the number of people receiving them also grows--this during a time when the economy in the United States has been stalled. What gives?

The situation is complex, but the maturation of client/server technologies by late 1994 and the explosion of the Internet as a business platform in 1995 were probably the major drivers behind bonuses in the late 1990s. Moreover, in 1995, the U.S. economy was coming out of a recession that had kept salaries more or less flat for a couple of years. There was pent-up demand for salary increases, and obviously it was easier for skittish companies, unsure of the economy, to give employees big bonuses each year, which do not in theory have to be given next year because they are not a true salary raises, than actually to jack up their salaries. But because of the strategic value that certain employees have for their companies, these bonuses cannot be easily dropped or lowered, and in fact, there is increasing pressure on companies to steadily increase these bonuses for managers and programmers to put their overall compensation on par with other managers and skilled workers at the company and their IT peers in the same industries and geographies. As Viall says, what the company giveth, it cannot taketh away.