IBM's iSeries and OS/400 V5R2 Announcements, Part Deux

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

First things first. A bunch of you have been asking me for months what AS/400 and iSeries iron OS/400 V5R2 would run on, and I could never get a definitive answer from Big Blue. We all knew that V5R2 would not be supported on the first generation of RISC AS/400 processors, the 4XX and 5XX machines, which date from 1995. But it was unclear if IBM would be supporting V5R2 on all of the other models in the PowerPC-based OS/400 server line. Well, those of you with Model 150 and early vintage Model 170 servers will be happy to learn that IBM has said that all makes and vintages of Model 150 and Model 170 servers can run OS/400 V5R2. All iSeries Model 250, Model 270, and Model 8XX machines are, of course, supported, as are Model 6XX, SXX, and 7XX servers. This will come as a tremendous relief to small companies that have Model 150 servers as their main application machines, as well as to the many thousands of companies in Europe that scatter these entry machines around to meet regional data-processing needs.

As we suggested IBM would eventually do a few weeks ago, the company is going to support full-blown AIX partitions on a future release of iSeries machines. IBM issued a statement of direction on AIX support, and that means we will not see AIX partitions for about two years. That's well into the Power5 generation. To be quite blunt, that is a long, long time away, and is not particularly useful for customers who might want to consolidate AIX workloads--particularly those running Oracle--onto a single platform. The people I talked to in Rochester, as well as various third parties in the know about IBM's plans, gave me the impression when I first started digging around on this AIX partition support issue that it would not take this long to bring it to market. Apparently they were wrong, or something changed IBM's mind about the speed with which it should introduce AIX onto the iSeries. IBM is ever wary of self-impact. Officially, all IBM says about AIX support on the iSeries is that it will be available in a future OS/400 release, as yet to be determined. In the meantime, the OS/400 PASE AIX runtime environment is continually being enhanced. The new Tivoli Storage Manager 5.1 for OS/400, in fact, is a PASE-enabled application, just like OS/400's TCP/IP stack and probably a bunch of other programs.

Support for 255 logical partitions, which we know is coming, is also slated for a future OS/400 release, although the documentation we have says it was supposed to be in OS/400 V5R2.

IBM also announced that work is progressing on the Linux versions of DB2 Universal Database and the WebSphere application server running within Linux partitions on iSeries machines. IBM has issued a statement of direction on these initiatives, and has said that a product will come to market around 12 to 18 months after the SOD is made. In this case, sources say, these two products could become available even earlier than that. That could be either when OS/400 V5R2 starts shipping in August, the end of this year, or early next year.

OS/400 V5R2 will also now support "Wolfpack" cluster services from Microsoft. While Microsoft has for years allowed failover clustering for two nodes for Windows NT 4.0, and has announced two-node clustering for Windows 2000 Server, four-node clusters for Windows 2000 Advanced Server, and eight-node clustering for Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, the iSeries did not support any clustering at all of Windows servers, whether they were Integrated xSeries Servers (IxS) or external xSeries machines attached through the Integrated xSeries Adapter (IxA). With OS/400 V5R2, OS/400 shops can finally create more resilient integrated Windows servers for their iSeries and AS/400 machines, since Cluster Services will now work across the iSeries and AS/400 backplane on machines running Windows 2000. Each Windows cluster within a hybrid OS/400- Windows environment can have up to four IxS or IxA servers in it. Incidentally, the IxA cards will now hook into IBM's latest four-way xSeries 360 and eight-way xSeries 440 servers, which use Intel's Pentium 4 Xeon processors.

IBM also says that the Virtual Ethernet (VLAN) links that create a virtual Ethernet link between partitions running on the iSeries memory bus have now been extended to IxS and IxA machines as well. Up to 16 Virtual Ethernet links can be enabled as pipes between Windows servers and OS/400 or Linux partitions, which should make n-tier applications perform a whole lot better than they do with real Ethernet LANs. AIX will eventually support VLAN on the iSeries hardware as well.

The OS/400 Apache Web server, which has been integrated with the operating system since V5R1, has been enhanced with a high-performance Web caching extension that sources at IBM say will more than double the Web serving performance of OS/400 servers, compared with OS/400 V5R1 and prior generations of the operating system. IBM has long since developed Web caching extensions to the Windows version of Apache, which, like the improvements in OS/400, were developed by IBM Research. (My guess is that they are the same improvements.) IBM says that the Apache accelerator for OS/400 V5R2 will boost the performance of both static and dynamic HTML pages.

OS/400 V5R2 will also support a new generation of cryptographic coprocessors to boost the performance of Secure Sockets Layer and Transport Layer Security data encryption. IBM plans to announce new PCI- based cryptographic coprocessors, with up to five installable in a single server. These coprocessors can reduce data encryption times by a factor of 30, compared with using the main processors in an AS/400 or iSeries server, says IBM. IBM will also reportedly announce two new PCI Ethernet adapters and two new communications adapters in the next few months.

And, finally, with regard to IBM's extremely vague pronouncements about the upgrade path from the Model 270 to a future iSeries machine, which we discussed in February and March in this newsletter, the party line now is that IBM really meant that it was going to offer customers a special upgrade deal that has, according to IBM sources, been piloting among Model 6XX customers since late last year. I've been told that this trade-in program offers companies anywhere from 3 to 10 times the residual values of the vintage Model 6XX servers to customers who move to Model 820s, and that a similar trade-in program will be available for Model 270 customers to get into the Model 8XX line in the second half of 2002. While all of this may be true now, I do not believe for a second that this was what IBM meant when it said to business partners on a conference call that it would be offering Model 270 users upgrades to a "future product."

No matter what spin IBM puts on it, I think the pSeries got the Regatta-M servers early, as embodied in the pSeries 670, and the iSeries is therefore going to get them later, since yields are still not great on the Power4s. As far as performance goes, 99.9 percent of iSeries customers can get by fine with S-Star PowerPC machines, and resellers are begging IBM to stop changing the iSeries lineup because it complicates the sales cycle in an already tough environment. And since an iSeries product line refresh almost always means a price cut across the line, resellers are probably also telling IBM that they would really prefer to put off those other iSeries Regatta announcements as long as is practical. Only a few weeks ago, people in the Rochester facility were saying that the Regatta-H announcements were being moved up, and that there was some debate going on within IBM as to when it should announce new midrange iSeries models. Some people said there would be S-Star machines; others said Regattas. But everyone I spoke to was under the clear impression that something was coming this year other than the iSeries Model 890. IBM says flat out that it never intended to announce any other iSeries servers this year besides the Regatta-H Model 890. Period.

This mixed message is exactly what happened with the Pulsar PowerPC servers, which were ready to rock in September 1999, when the RS/6000 S80 "Condor" servers made their debut. Everybody knew that the AS/400 versions of these machines were expected in February 2000, and IBM even told people that when the Northstar PowerPC 7XX machines were announced in February 1999. But as 1999 drew to a close, IBM said that there would be no new AS/400 machines during the first half of 2000. IBM made such a bold announcement because it knew OS/400 shops were waiting for new machines and the consequent price cuts. The Pulsar machines were not announced until May 2000 and didn't start shipping until the end of July. IBM's story then was that it was waiting for the I-Star processors so it could have a PR coup over the pSeries machines, but, as 2000 unfolded, it became clear that what was really happening was that IBM had a rather severe shortage of copper-based PowerPC processors, and that the pSeries line needed as many of these processors as IBM could make in order to compete against Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard in the Unix server market. The iSeries got the short end of the stick then, and I think it is getting the short end now, regardless of the official announcement schedule. However, if OS/400 V5R2 needs a lot more tuning to work well on the Power4 machines--as AIX 5L surely does--then it is probably for our own good.

The reason any of this matters is that the iSeries has to keep pace with cutting-edge technologies if it hopes to maintain its position in the market, much less expand that position.