A Bunch of IBM iSeries Announcements

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sometimes IBM makes big announcements that radically change the iSeries market, and sometimes it makes a bunch of little announcements that affect most customers in one way or another. Last week was one of the latter type, and this week I'll give you the lowdown on the little things IBM is up to in iSeriesland.

First of all, IBM has amended its "It Pays To Lease" financing program, announced on March 8, such that you don't have to acquire a new iSeries to take part in the deal, but now you can make other kinds of upgrades and feature improvements--what IBM calls configuration changes--to the systems and still get the financing. Under this deal, which is one of a handful of concurrent financing options IBM has on the table at this time, you have to finance at least $1,000 of gear and finance it for between 24 to 48 months for servers, storage, and PCs or up to 60 months for retail and point of sale equipment. The lease on this gear is a fair market value (FMV) lease, which means you agree to buy it for that amount at the end of the term (as opposed to a $1 value lease, which is another kind of lease IBM writes). If you do this, you get a rebate of 5 percent of the value of the equipment leased. The configuration changes have to result in a new lease being written and IBM has removed the $1 million cap on this financing deal. iSeries, pSeries, xSeries, storage, PCs and workstations, retail equipment, printers, and Cisco Systems networking gear can be financed under this deal.

IBM also jacked up the maintenance prices on the feature 0595 I/O drawer for iSeries and i5 servers and on the feature 5095 I/O tower. Starting May 1, Enterprise Server Agreements (ESA) with 24x7 coverage for these towers will cost $220 per month, up from $122 per month. ESA contracts with 9x5 business hour coverage will cost $159 per month, up from $88 per month. If you want to get an IBM Onsite Repair (IOR) service contract for either of these boxes, it will cost you $250 per month, up from $139 per month.

IBM last week also said it would withdraw support for WebSphere Development Studio Client for iSeries V5.0 and WebSphere Development Studio Client Advanced Edition for iSeries V5.0 on April 30, 2006. So basically, if you use these products, you have a year to upgrade to more current development tools. Support for WebSphere Host Access Transformation Server (HATS) for Multiplatforms V4 is also set to end on April 30, 2006; support for WebSphere HATS V5 for Multiplatforms, for eServer iSeries, and for zSeries, are set to end on April 30, 2007. Again, that's plenty of time to do your planning if you are on these products.

This latter item concerning OS/400 and i5/OS support levels I am bringing up not because IBM has made a formal announcement last week, but because I have not seen this information published before and I assume that many of you have not, either. OS/400 V4R5 had its support ended on December 31, 2002, and upgrades to OS/400 V5R1 were killed off on November 21, 2003. That's not news. But, on October 1, 2005, you will no longer be able to upgrade from OS/400 V4R5 to OS/400 V5R2, which is the last OS/400 release you can get to from OS/400 V4R5, since upgrades to i5/OS V5R3 from V4R5 are not available and never will be. OS/400 V5R1 will see its support end on September 30, 2005, and upgrades from V5R1 to V5R2 will also no longer be supported as of the next day, October 1, 2005. IBM has not yet announced end of support dates for OS/400 V5R2 or i5/OS V5R3, nor has it decided when upgrades from V5R1 and V5R2 to i5/OS V5R3 will be killed off. Once these upgrades are withdrawn, you have to do manual upgrades--which IBM warns requires custom services, which is corporate speak for big bucks.

If you are on OS/400 V4R5, best to get a move on and plan your upgrade, and it probably makes sense to move to V5R2 as soon as you can. If you have the time and patience, it probably makes even more sense to jump right into i5/OS V5R3, so you can just sit tight for a while if that is what you need. All of this advice is predicated, of course, on the fact that you have hardware that supports these more modern releases. If not, it might be a good time to consider a push-pull box swap to an i5 machine, which will probably be a lot easier and will result in much-improved performance for most OS/400 workloads.