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iSeries Regattas, V5R2 Expected in July
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
According to IBM sources, the company will launch its much-anticipated iSeries "Regatta" Power4-based servers on July 23. IBM is expected to debut the next release of OS/400, V5R2, on that date as well.
The iSeries Regatta announcement will follow the debut of that hardware platform in the pSeries line by nearly 10 months, and follow the shipment of pSeries Regattas, which are sold as the pSeries 690s, by more than eight months. IBM's last big iSeries hardware announcement was on April 23, 2001, when the PowerPC S-Star iSeries line debuted with OS/400 V5R1. The S-Star processors come in speeds of 540 MHz or 600 MHz; other recent AS/400 and iSeries machines use a mix 400 MHz and 450 MHz Pulsar processors, which made their debut in the third quarter of 1999, and 400 MHz, 500 MHz, and 540 MHz I-Star processors, which first came on to the market a year later.
The biggest iSeries machine, the Model 840, is based on the eServer pSeries "Condor" server frame, which can support up to 24 I-Star or S-Star processors. The Power4-based Regatta servers are expected to initially have from eight to 32 processors running at 1.1 GHz or 1.3 GHz. Slower clock speeds also may be available, to better flesh out the iSeries line. Faster processors might be available as well by July, if IBM gets better yield on new chip process technologies, and it wouldn't be surprising to see Power4s in the range of 1.5 GHz by then, either. However, IBM is probably keen on saving its fastest Power4 chips for the pSeries line, for which there are thousands of potential commercial and technical customers (the Regatta servers are really just nodes of a very fast parallel supercomputer, if you look at them carefully); there are only a few hundred potential big iSeries customers. In the Unix racket, speed and price/performance are everything because of direct competition among Unix server vendors; most applications running on DB2, Oracle or Sybase databases run on all the major Unix platforms. Hence, Unix vendors have to compete head-on. The iSeries only competes with these machines indirectly--except at the few companies each year that are replacing their OS/400 iron with Unix boxes--because Oracle, Sybase and the Unix variant of DB2 are not supported on the iSeries, and some of the major Unix application suites (Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP suites come to mind) are not enthusiastically supported on OS/400 or are not available at all. So having the fastest or most cost-effective server platform is not much of an issue for the iSeries in this regard. Of course, IBM will probably use its CFINT processor performance governor to create Regatta servers with a range of performance on various workloads, including 5250 green-screen applications, Domino, WebSphere, and so forth.
Many people in the industry had been expecting OS/400 V5R2 to debut in May 2002, a year after the launch of OS/400 V5R1. But this will not happen. The word on the street is that IBM wants to more time to tweak and tune V5R2 before putting it into production. IBM probably would have liked to launch the kicker to its Domino R5 middleware, the so-called "Rnext" version, at the same time as OS/400 V5R2 (see "iSeries Regatta, Maybe V5R2, Due In Second Half Of 2002," October 15, 2001). But IBM will not hold up the Rnext announcement until July to time it with the iSeries Regatta and OS/400 V5R2 launches, and we will probably see Rnext come out in the next few months.
Among other things, Domino Rnext apparently will allow customers to use DB2/400 (and, indeed, any of IBM's DB2 database variants for mainframes, Unix, Windows, Linux, and OS/400 servers) as the primary repository for Domino and Notes applications. This is far simpler than having Notes and DB2 databases on the same machine and, in effect, makes Notes and Domino yet another bolt-on for DB2.
New SQL Optimizers On The Way
According to sources, OS/400 V5R2 will include completely revamped DB2/400 SQL optimizers, as well as numerous other DB2 enhancements, to make DB2/400 more like the code base for DB2 Universal Database for the Unix and Windows platforms. IBM also is expected to provide completely graphical operations--graphical console operations were cranky in early implementations of V5R1, and IBM doesn't want to go down that road again. Improvements that need to be made for future Java and WebSphere releases may also have pushed OS/400 V5R2 out to July. IBM is also trying to make the logical partitioning in OS/400 more flexible and sophisticated, yet easier to use, which is no easy task. No matter what, there are two important things to remember. First, most customers have no idea what is in V5R1 yet. Second, IBM will not want to ship OS/400 V5R2 if it is not ready for prime time, even if it means not having a killer third and fourth quarter selling big Regatta servers. The kinds of enterprise customers who will buy iSeries Regattas will not take kindly to IBM shipping them an unstable box.
V5R2 will not run on first-generation RISC-based AS/400 machines in the Model 4XX and Model 5XX families, which date from 1995. But it will run on Apache and Northstar generations of Model 150, Model 6XX, and Model SXX servers; on the Northstar generation of Model 170, Model 250, and Model 7XX servers; on the Pulsar, I-Star, and S-Star generations of Model 270 and Model 8XX servers; and on the Power4-based iSeries Regatta servers, which may be branded as the Model 52s, according to the industry scuttlebutt.
The iSeries Regattas will not support I/O towers for disk, tape, and other peripherals that use the System Products Division bus architecture, developed by IBM for the AS/400 line. V5R2 will support SPD devices on these older AS/400 and iSeries machines. IBM is emphasizing its High Speed Link I/O technology going forward (see "iSeries Announcement Roundup," August 27, 2001).
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