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IBM Reveals Interesting iSeries Statistics
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
Kim Stevenson, vice president of iSeries marketing at IBM, recently held an iSeries Nation chat, and spent a lot of time talking
about the new iSeries Model 890 and V5R2 announcements, as you might expect. But she also divulged a
bunch of interesting statistics about the iSeries installed base. And she made a number of other interesting
comments as well.
On the adoption of logical partitioning among the iSeries base: Stevenson says that over 44 percent of
customers using high-end iSeries servers asked IBM's iSeries factories to preconfigure the machines with
logical partitions. In the year following the initial release of logical partitioning several years ago, only a
few hundred customers had adopted logical partitioning. Stevenson did not elaborate on what a high-end
customer was--presumably this is a company buying at least a Model 830 or Model 840 machine. But she
did say that five percent of the uniprocessors that have been shipped since OS/400 V5R1 became available
have gone out the door with partitions activated. My sources at IBM tell me that about 35 percent of all
iSeries machines shipped since May 2001 have been enabled for partitions, and by my math that is at least
10,000 machines. None of this takes into account the large numbers of customers who can turn on their
own partitions, since the software to setup and use partitions is built into OS/400 V4R5 and V5R1 and IBM
has no way of tracking what customers do with these AS/400 and iSeries machines. There are probably at
least twice as many machines configured with logical partitioning as IBM knows about, and the number
could be even higher than that. This is a pretty decent adoption curve and is a testament to the efforts of the
people in Rochester and Somers who pushed to get partitioning technologies not only on the OS/400
platform but also ahead of even the AIX platform. Good job.
On adoption of capacity on demand among the iSeries base: Stevenson said that 33 percent of Model
840 customers had opted to take advantage of the optional capacity-on-demand services and features that
IBM offered on these machines. With IBM's Capacity Upgrade on Demand (CUoD) offerings, extra
processors are put into an iSeries server and as customers need to add processing capacity, they activated
through special purchasing and control systems managed by IBM. So now all four-way and higher
machines in the iSeries Model 8XX line have CUoD built in from the get-go, and IBM says that it
is no longer charging a 15 percent premium for processing capacity delivered in this manner. My guess is
that IBM is counting on the "potato-chip effect"--you can't have just one--to temp iSeries shops into using
the extra capacity in the boxes they buy. And because iSeries shops will negotiate while keeping the CUoD
aspects of their iSeries servers in mind, from the beginning of a deal on through to when it is approved by
the bean counters, it will be easier economically, as well as technically, to add processing capacity to an
iSeries server. This, again, is a smart move by IBM that helps customers, as well as IBM. We should all
encourage more of this behavior by praising it: Good job, IBM.
On native AIX for the iSeries: Stephenson confirmed that IBM would bring the full-blown AIX
operating system to iSeries partitions in 2004, as we have discussed in prior issues of this newsletter. The
interesting tidbit of information she divulged is that 90 percent of the high-end iSeries customer base has
Unix servers of one kind or another doing mission-critical work. As she correctly pointed out, many of
these customers would love to consolidate down to one platform supporting these environments. You
cannot consolidate Unix workloads without supporting the Unix versions of Oracle and IBM DB2 databases, so IBM has to put AIX on partitions if
it is to get these customers to consider running Unix workloads on the iSeries.
On WebSphere Development Studio: Stevenson said that IBM shipped over 50,000 copies of the
WebSphere Development Studio application development tool last year; IBM has said previously that it
shipped 25,000 copies of OS/400 V5R1 last year, too. While the numbers for V5R1 were probably
curtailed a little by initial skittishness about the new version of OS/400 when it debuted last May and by
sluggish iSeries hardware sales, shipments of WebSphere Development Studio did not seem to be impacted
by these factors. The uptake of WebSphere Development Studio might be a leading indicator for improved
sales of iSeries machines. I certainly hope so.
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