IBM Talks Up OS/400 V5R2 at COMMON

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM was mum on many of the features we have reported on in The Four Hundred during the past few weeks, such as AIX partitioning and supporting up to 255 logical partitions on a single machine, but it did go into some detail about some other interesting features in V5R2.

Buell Duncan, general manager of the MidMarket Server Division, within IBM's Server Group, said at the COMMON Town Hall meeting last Tuesday that the company would deliver dynamic logical partitioning support for the Linux operating system when running on the iSeries. Right now, under OS/400 V5R1, Linux partitions are static--meaning they have to be manually sized and rebooted when processor, memory, or I/O capacity is changed with changing workload conditions. OS/400 partitions in V5R1 are dynamic--meaning that, as workloads change, partitions can automatically reallocate resources from partitions that don't need them to those that do. As is also commonly known by now, and was reported in our new "But Wait, There's More . . ." section of this newsletter, OS/400 V5R2 is also expected to support the 64-bit implementation of the Linux 2.4 kernel, and Turbolinux has announced that it is the first of the commercial Linux distributors to get its iSeries implementation of Linux for the PowerPC out the door. Duncan also said that IBM would, as expected, deliver the iSeries Regatta servers using its Power4 processors. He said the iSeries Regattas would have about 1.85 times the performance of the current 24-way "Turbo Condor" Model 840 server using the 600 MHz S-Star PowerPC processors. He didn't say anything else about the machines, including when IBM would make them available.

Kim Stevenson, vice president of marketing for the iSeries line, said at the Town Hall meeting that OS/400 V5R2 would include new intuitive workload management tools through iSeries Navigator, formerly known as Operations Navigator. She said that V5R2 would offer switchable, independent auxiliary storage pools (known as either "switchable iASPs" or "switchable disks" in IBM's evolving lingo for this new technology). Exactly how the V5R2 implementation of switchable disks is different from that delivered in V5R1 is unclear, but we will find out more when IBM actually makes the V5R2 announcement. What is known is that the switchable disks code in V5R1 allowed a set of files stored in OS/400's Integrated File System to be switched between two servers linked to the IFS, as distinct from OS/400's integrated DB2/400 database file system. With the V5R2 implementation of switchable disks, now database files can be switched between two OS/400 servers. Stevenson also said that V5R2 would allow multiple DB2/400 images to coexist on the same platform, which might allow companies to consolidate databases and applications without having to resort to logical partitioning.

Ian Jarman, product marketing manager for the iSeries line, confirmed in a V5R2 session at COMMON that BMC Software's BEST/1 performance tool would not be included in OS/400 V5R2, which we told you about last summer. He said that IBM, which has been using BEST/1 for about as long as anyone can remember, to model AS/400 and iSeries performance on simulated and real-world customer workloads, would be replacing BEST/1 with BMC's Patrol. (I've been told that it is too costly and time consuming to keep BEST/1 updated as IBM announces new generations of OS/400 servers.) Last summer, sources at BMC said that they were considering putting the company's Patrol performance monitoring and modeling software on the iSeries. Well, as it turns out, Patrol for the iSeries is the new tool. If you have Performance Tools and paid to get BEST/1 added to it, you will have to buy Patrol from BMC for V5R2.

Jarman also said that one of the cool new things in OS/400 V5R2 is a revamped transaction monitoring system that can differentiate between the regular, single-threaded database transactions, which are the bread and butter of RPG and COBOL applications running on OS/400 servers, and the multi-threaded, complex, distributed applications that are typified by e-business applications supported on IBM's WebSphere and MQSeries middleware and usually based at least partially on Java. IBM mainframe and Unix customers have to buy external transaction monitoring programs, like CICS or TXSeries, to keep their transactions humming along; OS/400 has always had its own integrated transaction monitoring system (which doesn't even have a name). The new Adaptive e-Transaction Services component of OS/400 V5R2 knows the difference between these two kinds of workloads and automatically optimizes the performance of these two radically different kinds of transactions on the fly, without any programming changes to applications. The upshot is that WebSphere and Java e-business applications will run faster than they did on prior OS/400 releases, and RPG and COBOL applications will run highly optimized, just like before. IBM has not said what kind of performance improvements to expect, however. The iSeries Navigator also now knows how to differentiate and track these radically different kinds of workloads, and presents them in a single global view even though, in the case of multi-threaded e-business applications, the programs supporting these transactions are running in different parts of the system as separate jobs. These two advances should make the job of system tuning and administration considerably easier.

Sources at IBM have confirmed that OS/400 V5R2 will not run on the AS/400 Model 4XX "Cobra4" and Model 5XX "Muskie" servers that were announced in the summer of 1995 and started shipping with OS/400 V3R7 in volume in early 1996. This was the first generation of AS/400 servers to sport the 64-bit Rochester variants of the PowerPC processors, co-developed by IBM, Motorola, and Apple. OS/400 V5R2 will run on the Cobra4, Apache, and Northstar generations of 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. I am looking into whether or not V5R2 will be supported on the AS/400 Model 150 entry servers, which use the Cobra4 chip. There seems to be some confusion about this.