IBM Tweaks Power Systems Deals, Enables Encryption and Web Development

Published: February 14, 2011

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In addition to cutting some prices on IBM i Solution Edition end user entitlements and formalizing an i5/OS and i license-sliding scheme to make licenses more fluid across machines as is reported on elsewhere in this edition of The Four Hundred, IBM also made a few tweaks to some existing deals and some other announcements that are relevant to OS/400 and i shops.

First of all, IBM has made some minor changes to two existing deals that gives customers rebates if they are installing Power Systems for the first time or replacing other iron with Power Systems. In the revised Software Solutions for IBM Power Systems Competitive Migration Rebate offering that is tweaked in announcement letter 311-019, the Power 560 (8234-EMA) and Power 570 (9117-MMA) have been removed as eligible machines that customers can buy to take part in the deal. IBM has also added more configurations of the Power 750 machine, which uses the new Power7 processors, to the eligible list of machines. Specifically, Power 750s running varying numbers of 3.55 GHz processors and cores are on the list now. Spillman Technologies, a maker of integrated software for running police, sheriff, and fire departments, has been added to the list of eligible ISV providers whose applications qualify for helping customers get the rebates. The rebates are nominal, ranging from $500 on a PS700 entry blade server to $140,000 on a Power 795. In announcement letter 311-020, the same exact changes were made to the Software Solutions for IBM Power Systems First-in-Location Rebate offering, which has the same rebate schedule.

In announcement letter 211-021, IBM also said that the Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC) digital signal algorithm is now supported on the PCI-Express cryptographic co-processors that were announced concurrently with the PS7XX blade servers last April. These co-processors, known as features 4807, 4808, and 4809 depending on the server, combine the cryptographic acceleration and storage of cryptographic keys on the same tamper sensing and tamper responding device. The cards meet the FIPS 140-2 level 4 U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards, and offer the same cryptographic functions as were provided in the feature 4764 PCI-X co-processor; however, the new co-processors have redundant processors that are lockstepped for fault tolerance. The co-processor supports the single-, double-, and triple-length DES and 128-, 192-, and 256-bit AES encryption algorithms, and now ECC. IBM says that a PTF will be made available on February 18 that enables the ECC algorithm on the crypto co-processor when used in conjunction with IBM i 6.1 or 7.1.

Finally, IBM has also rolled up a new Web Enablement for i stack (that's product number 5722-WE2). This one wraps up IBM's WebSphere Application Server Express 7 middleware with the IBM i 7.1 operating system, IBM i Access for Web, and all the necessary PTFs (with the dependencies all checked and verified) so you can load this Web serving environment and be ready to go all at once. IBM has done similar rollups for i5/OS V5R4 and IBM i 6.1, and like these earlier releases, the one for IBM i 7.1 is free.

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