The Four Hundred

OS/400 Edition
Volume 11, Number 12 -- March 25, 2002

IBM Gives Trade-Ins on Vintage AS/400e Generation Servers

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you have a vintage AS/400e "Cobra4" and "Apache" generation server, IBM has a deal for you. Last week, IBM announced a special trade-in promotion designed to entice customers using vintage Model 170, 6XX, and SXX servers from the AS/400e generation to upgrade to modern Model 270 and 8XX iSeries servers. The AS/400e servers first started shipping in August 1997 and, with clock speeds ranging from 50 MHz to 125 MHz, they are a little long in the tooth.

Some of the vintage Model 170, 6XX, and SXX servers in the deal use 50 MHz and 77 MHz Cobra4 PowerPC processors, which are even less powerful than the Apache chips that followed them into the market. The Cobra4 chips were IBM's first single-chip, 64-bit implementation of the PowerPC chip architecture, and it is the basis of all the AS/400 processors since then and the current iSeries processors sold today. IBM has tweaked and tuned the Cobra4 core to create the Apache, Northstar, Pulsar, I-Star, and S-Star 64-bit processors, and many of those changes result in dramatically more powerful machines than clock speed along can account for. While the machines using the Cobra4 and Apache chips were fine in their time, it has been over five years since they were announced and IBM wants these customers to move. Of course, these being AS/400 servers, they do the jobs they are asked to do, they generally do not cause much trouble, and they don't cost much to run. So selling an upgrade or a whole new machine to these customers is not so easy. Hence, IBM is starting to use trade-in credits--good toward the purchase of other IBM wares and services--to try to entice these customers to spend some money. Some of them may actually do it.

The trade-in deal that IBM announced is complex, with so many exceptions it is hard to tell what machines are eligible for the deal, and harder still to tell if the trade-ins represent a bargain or not. What can be said simply about the trade-in deal is that the trade-in is that the amount of credits that customers get depends on the machine being traded in and the one being acquired. (To see the parameters of the deal, click here.) This trade-in promotion is applicable for machines installed between March 22 and July 10.

In addition to the Cobra4 and Apache trade-in deal, IBM also announced a promotion offering credits to customers doing a horizontal upgrade from a Model 730 Northstar server to a Model 820 I-Star or S-Star server. The Model 730s have one, two, four, or eight 262 MHz Northstar PowerPC processors. The current generation of Model 820s, which are the only ones eligible for this new trade-in deal, have one, two, or four 600 MHz S-Star processors. Under normal circumstances, IBM would force Model 730 customers to upgrade to a Model 830 server. But as it is, moving to a Model 820 server with half the number of processors as a customer's current Northstar processor count in the Model 730 will still result in an increase of power. Moving to a Model 830 with an equivalent number of processors yields anywhere from two to three times the processing capacity. No traditional OS/400 shop has workloads that are growing that fast. Not even dot-coms grew that fast. This is why IBM has to offer a special deal here to get companies to buy new iSeries machines rather than do upgrades on their Model 730s using used equipment. (To see a table outlining the parameters of this upgrade, click here.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

DataMirror Launches Hostile Takeover of Rival Vision Solutions

Fast400 OS/400 Governor Buster May Re-Emerge This Week

IBM Gives Trade-Ins on Vintage AS/400e Generation Servers

IBM Shipping Seagate Drives As iSeries Disk Problems Persist

Admin Alert Correction: Our PC5250 Mistake, Your Gain with Two Tech Tips

Kronos Acquires HR/Payroll Product Line

Lakeview Working on MIMIX for Windows

Will OS/400 Shops Take LPAR-Based Server Consolidation to Heart?

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