Old i5 520 Express, iSeries Upgrades, and OS/400 V5R2 Booted

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As always happens the aftermath of a major set of OS/400 platform announcements, IBM has given its business partners and customers fair warning that some products, features, and upgrades are about to be dropped from the iSeries and i5 catalog. Last week, IBM killed off the initial i5 520 Express machines announced in May 2004, which have replacements. The company also plans to withdraw various feature conversions, upgrades from first-generation iSeries machines, OS/400 V5R2, and a bunch of other stuff.

Back in October, IBM rejiggered the i5 520 Express offering and created a new server group, the 9405 group, to simplify its system configurators. Since the dawn of time (well, 1994), IBM has put all of the AS/400 and iSeries machines in the 9406 class, which used to be just for high-end machines. Before 1994, IBM had 9401 puppy AS/400s, 9402 deskside AS/400s, 9404 midrange AS/400s, and 9406 rack-mounted AS/400s? This organization of OS/400 servers made sense to me. But the configurators got pretty snarled up when IBM had to offer upgrades between these classes of machines and preserve serial numbers. Which is why everything got dumped into the 9406 class. Well, this is too complex now, which is why there is a 9405 group expressly for the i5 520 Express machines, which are preconfigured systems that have geared-down Power5 processors and a mix of 5250 and raw processing capacity. I would like to thank the people who write IBM's announcement letters for the five minutes of raw adrenalin when I thought (incorrectly) that IBM had withdrawn all 520 Express machines from marketing. That moment of anger saved me from having to drink a few cups of coffee last Friday. In any event, IBM will remove the initial 9406 versions of the 520 Express machines from marketing on April 1 (no joke).

On that same day, IBM also plans to withdraw the OS/400 PASE AIX runtime environment (feature 5732 of OS/400) from marketing, as well as its feature 1893 36.4 GB, 10K RPM disk drives. Now that the i5 supports the real AIX, IBM doesn't want to sell customers an AIX runtime environment or pay to support it on older machines. Customers who want to run Unix applications on their OS/400 platforms will just have to upgrade to i5s and run the real AIX.

On February 8, IBM killed off a bunch of obsolete feature conversions. (To get a listing of all the features withdrawn, see IBM's announcement letter.) These conversions include those to convert processor and 5250 interactive features in first-generation iSeries machines to similar features in the second-generation iSeries boxes, which were launched in January 2003 with OS/400 V5R2 Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition instead of interactive hardware features.

On October 1, IBM will no longer sell the following iSeries and i5 upgrades:

• From iSeries 270 to iSeries 810
• From iSeries 820 to iSeries 820 (really a side-ways upgrade), 825, and 870
• From iSeries 820 to i5 520, 550, 570
• From iSeries 830 to iSeries 825, 870, and 890
• From iSeries 830 to i5 520, 550, 570, and 595
• From iSeries 840 to iSeries 870 and 890
• From iSeries 840 to i5 570 and 595

So if you didn't get the message, you have until October 1 to acquire an upgrade from a first-generation iSeries box. Otherwise, you will have to rely on third parties and the availability of space parts for your box or do a push-pull upgrade that will force you to write-off the remaining asset value of that iSeries box. There are a slew of related feature conversions for these iSeries machines that will be killed off on October 1 as well.

October 1 is also when IBM will stop selling OS/400 V5R2. IBM has not said yet how long OS/400 V5R2 will be supported, but it could be well into 2006 or 2007. Various programs related to OS/400 V5R2 will also be removed from the IBM catalog on October 1.

If you need to order an old iSeries box, an upgrade, or OS/400 V5R2, the last day IBM is taking orders is September 30.