by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The word on the street is that IBM will be making a bunch of server announcements at its upcoming PartnerWorld 2002 conference for partners and resellers, being held in San Francisco February 17 through 20. The star of the PartnerWorld conference most likely will not be the iSeries software bundle solutions that the company is expected to roll out along with a revamped Software Subscription service. But Guild Companies will have people on the floor to get the skinny on whatever iSeries announcements IBM and its partners make, which we think will be important even if they are overshadowed by other IBM announcements.

The hot topic at PartnerWorld--aside from the difficulty of getting resellers to boost hardware, software, and services sales in a stagnant economy so IBM can make its numbers for 2002--will probably be the two low-end mainframe servers, apparently code-named "Raptor" and "Puma," that will debut running z/OS V1R3, IBM's new z/OS operating system, as well as Linux. The low-end Raptor server, which I hear has anywhere from one to four processors, is the first product to come out of the server development alliance that IBM signed last year with former server competitor Hitachi. The Raptor server is built by Hitachi and uses tweaked G7-II series mainframe engines; the original G7 engines made their debut in the "Freeway" zSeries 900 servers a little more than a year ago. IBM will actually debut the Raptor servers at the end of January at the LinuxWorld trade show in New York. Bill Zeitler, general manager of the Server Group, will give the keynote speech at LinuxWorld and will likely introduce Raptor running the 64-bit Linux kernel, to show that IBM is thinking about offering a lower-cost Linux server suitable for small and midsize businesses. The Puma server could be, if my sources are correct, an 8-way zSeries server using the G7-II engines. (I am working from extremely thin data, so Puma could turn out to be something else.)

IBM is also expected to debut two new low-end pSeries servers at the PartnerWorld show that were due in October 2001 but got pushed out to February 2002. Both machines are expected to use 32-bit, 800 MHz Motorola PowerPC MP7540 processors equipped with 2 MB of integrated L2/L3 cache memory. The pSeries 620, code-named "Thresher," is a dual-processor machine that comes in a tower configuration that can be expanded to 3 GB of main memory. The pSeries 640 "Xena" rack-mounted server uses the same two-way motherboard and comes in a 1U form factor. These machines are expected to perform on the TPC-C online benchmark test at around 7,500 transactions per minute (TPM) with a single processor and at around 11,000 TPM with two processors. They will run 32-bit versions of AIX 4.3.3, AIX 5L 5.1, and Linux 2.4.

Because OS/400 is a 64-bit operating system and because the Motorola MP7540 chips do not have the PowerPC AS instruction extensions that the IBM PowerPC Star family of chips have to support OS/400, there will not be iSeries versions of the pSeries Thresher or Xena servers. IBM is not expected to make any significant iSeries server announcements until the summer, when the "Regatta" 32-way Power4 servers and OS/400 V5R2 are expected to be announced. Of course, it's a long time until summer, and that could change. I would not be surprised to see IBM make some announcements at the low-end of the iSeries range to try to spur demand for these boxes and make the machines more competitive against Windows and Linux servers based on the Intel platform.

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by Alex Woodie

A thief arrived at a Houston business early one Sunday morning in December, concrete block in hand. Down went the plate-glass front door at the business in question, a small retail fulfillment house with eight employees. The alarm went off. The police would be there in less than 10 minutes.

The thief entered the business, walked through a cubicle farm stocked with shiny new IBM PCs, and headed straight for the computer room in the back. He knew that's where the goods would be found: a sleek-looking black server that he thought would make this all worth while. He probably didn't know what he had there. It was an iSeries Model 270.

The thief used cable cutters to snip all the wires and cables coming out the back of the iSeries, except one, said John King, the company's system administrator. "Unfortunately, he didn't try to snip the power cord," he said. "I would have liked to have seen that."

After unplugging the power cord, the thief hefted the 50-pound box into his arms and walked out the front door, with time to spare. The perpetrator left no obvious clues as to his identity, and the police will probably never catch him.

Without its iSeries, the company could not do any work on Monday. A loaner box was set up by Tuesday, the backup tapes were loaded, and by the end of week the company had a permanent replacement. The company's insurance is paying to replace the stolen iSeries--at a cost of about $20,000--so King's company will be spared that cost.

All in all, it could have been worse. But to those who've heard about it, it seems a curious, if not ill-informed, crime.

Black Market for the Black Box?

The initial speculation was that the thief was probably one of the deliverymen that frequently entered the business. He probably saw a big tower in the back room during a delivery and figured it would fetch a few hundred dollars on the black market, King said.

Even so, King speculates that the thief didn't know what he was doing stealing an iSeries. "I can't imagine why any crook would do this," he said. "What are you going to do with it? It's such a specialty machine. In the same amount of time he spent stealing the iSeries, he could have schlepped all those IBM PCs."

King is right. In fact, the thief will find extreme difficulty in trying to resell King's iSeries for several reasons, said Eric Neill, an account executive at PaceButler Corporation, which sells used AS/400 and iSeries hardware.

The thief might be able to access the custom-written order-entry system King had loaded on the iSeries, Neill said, but he would not be able to make any changes or upgrades without running into licensing, LAC key, and proof of entitlement issues.

Each AS/400 and iSeries server possesses several unique identifying numbers, including the LAC key, which is a string of randomly generated numbers that operators must enter in order to add new software or make changes to configuration settings. If the LAC key is incorrectly entered, the user has 70 days to get the correct LAC key, or the iSeries shuts down. The user can call IBM customer service to get the correct LAC key but would need a valid customer number to get it. Similarly, other provisions in OS/400, such as the security officer's password, prevent unauthorized changes from being made.

Another factor discouraging the creation of a black market is the fairly tight-knit nature of the AS/400 and iSeries used hardware sales community, said Neill, who offered to forward the serial number of King's stolen iSeries on to other resellers in the network. If the thief ever contacted one the 300 used AS/400 hardware resellers in that network, that serial number would immediately flag the iSeries as a stolen box.

For these reasons, there is not much of a black market for AS/400 and iSeries hardware, Neill said. Though the weak licensing for the Windows operating system and the lower prices of Intel- based computers helped a black market for PCs to flourish, he said.

Good Market for AS/400 Parts

About the only thing a stolen AS/400 or iSeries is good for is parts, especially with the new iSeries Model 270s, Neill said. A thief might be able to fetch $2,000 to $5,000 by selling the memory, disks, and controller cards found in a typically equipped iSeries Model 270, he said.

iSeries components such as these can be bought and sold without any licensing issue, Neill said, and it's up to each used equipment dealer to do its own research into the background of the parts that are purchased.

Occasionally, someone tries to sell stolen iSeries parts. Neill recalls being approached a couple of years ago by someone claiming to work for a bank in California. The man said he had some equipment he wanted to sell, and when he asked PaceButler to make the check out in his name, it aroused suspicion. Upon calling the bank, it was discovered that the man actually worked for a consulting company that had recently upgraded the bank's AS/400, and the man was trying to sell the old parts, which actually belonged to the bank. He lost his job as a result.

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