The Four Hundred

OS/400 Edition
Volume 11, Number 23 -- June 10, 2002

Big Blue Reveals Future Plans for iSeries Software

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As part of its official rollout of OS/400 V5R2 last week, IBM revealed some of its intentions for future OS/400 releases and their associated systems programs. Because IBM likes happy OS/400 customers, the company has always been better than its competitors at revealing future plans, and it has given AS/400 and iSeries customers a healthy amount of warning about impending changes to AS/400 or iSeries hardware and OS/400 software or in the way that programs are packaged and priced.

OS/400 V5R2 and the iSeries Model 890 server, IBM revealed last week, will officially ship on August 30. The software will begin early shipments to a limited number of customers on the Model 890 Regatta server, which uses IBM's new Power4 processors, starting on June 14. OS/400 V5R2 will not run on any first-generation RISC-based AS/400 machines, which bear the designation Model 4XX or Model 5XX. These machines, which used the early Cobra4 and Muskie 64-bit PowerPC processors, date from 1995 and are very long in the tooth. (There are boat loads of them in the field, and they are still great machines, which is something you can say about a vintage AS/400 server that you generally can't say about other types of machines of the same age.) OS/400 V5R2 will run on Apache and Northstar generations of Model 150, 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 new Power4-based Model 890 server. It will, presumably, also work on future Power4-based machines, should IBM deliver them early next year, but if IBM holds off on upgrading the entry and midrange iSeries hardware platform until next summer or fall, it may also wait until OS/400 V5R3 is ready and debut these smaller Power4-based machines only with OS/400 V5R3. IBM could also debut entry and midrange versions of the Model 270 and Model 8XX machines using faster S-Star processors using 668 MHz and 750 MHz chips, and it could tie OS/400 V5R3 to these machines as well. IBM isn't saying what its plans are just yet.

But what the company is saying—and here's an important bit—is that OS/400 V5R2 will be the last OS/400 release to be supported on Model 150, 6XX, and SXX servers. The Model 150 is a machine with a geared-down 50 MHz--not 500 MHz, but 50 MHz--Cobra4 processor and a maximum of 192 MB of main memory. The Model 150's processor doesn't even have L2 cache memory, which is vital for running Java, for instance. The Model 150 may be sufficient for running a few seats processing green-screen transactions using RPG or COBOL programs, but it is not a suitable machine for running modern Web-enabled applications. It just doesn't have enough clock cycles, memory, or storage to do the job. Similarly, the 6XX and SXX servers, which were the first truly Web-enabled, e-business versions of the AS/400 line, date from the third quarter of 1997. By the time OS/400 V5R3 rolls around, all of these machines will have been in the field for six years, and will not be able to properly run modern application workloads. The 100 MHz and 125 MHz Apache processors can deliver decent green-screen performance, but they just don't have enough power to handle n-tier, Web-enabled applications. So V5R2 is the end of the line, and customers who want to keep current on OS/400 will have to move ahead. IBM will, of course, support OS/400 V5R2 on all AS/400 and iSeries machines that can run it for years to come. The current plan is to support OS/400 V5R2 until September 30, 2004, and OS/400 V5R1 until May 31, 2003. These OS/400 releases will continue to run beyond that date, but customers will have to either negotiate extended support contracts with IBM, find a third party supporter, or fend for themselves.

IBM didn't just reveal its future plans for OS/400 last week; the company put out a whole bunch of planning information. IBM warns that the following information is based on current plans and is subject to change or modification without notice:

IBM says that it is working on a version of its Connect for iSeries B2B middleware for OS/400 V5R2. Connect for iSeries, which was a big deal last year, in terms of IBM's marketing campaigns, is a stripped down version of its MQSeries message queuing middleware, which is now called WebSphere MQ. IBM says that V5R2 of Connect for iSeries will have equivalent functionality to the version supported on OS/400 V5R1, Connect for iSeries V1.1 (5733-B2B). IBM says that the version of Connect for iSeries for OS/400 V5R2 will be available sometime this year, and that the implementation for OS/400 V5R1 continues to be available.
Starting with Lotus Domino 6, which is expected sometime later this year, OS/400 shops will only be able to buy Domino products through the Passport Advantage channel that Software Group uses for many of its programs. IBM wanted to do this years ago, but someone within IBM Rochester was able to make the case that the core Lotus Domino servers should be sold not only through Passport Advantage but also as a regular OS/400 licensed program product. That is why Lotus Domino for iSeries (5769-LNP) and Lotus Enterprise Integrator (5769-LNT) were available through both channels. Sametime, QuickPlace, and other Lotus programs are only available through Passport Advantage, and this will continue to be the case.
OS/400 V5R2 is the last release of the operating system that will support Windows NT 4.0 on the Integrated xSeries Server (IxS) coprocessors for the iSeries and AS/400. IBM says further that it will support Microsoft's future Windows .NET Server operating systems on the IxS and external xSeries servers attached through the Integrated xSeries Adapter interface. IBM says that it plans to support the standard and enterprise editions of Windows .NET Server, which is supposed to make its debut by the end of 2002.
In OS/400 releases beyond V5R2, iSeries Access for Windows (formerly known as Client Access) will not be supported on PCs running Microsoft's Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows ME operating systems. The withdrawal of support will include all features and functions of iSeries Access for Windows, including EZ-Setup, iSeries Navigator (formerly Operations Navigator), Management Central, and Operations Console. IBM says that after V5R2, it will no longer support migrations from Client Access for Windows 95/NT and Client Access Enhanced for Windows 3.1 to iSeries Access for Windows. The iSeries Access for Windows will continue to be supported on PCs running Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, and Windows XP.
As a consequence of removing client support for Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME, iSeries NetServer, which provides Windows Network Neighborhood print and file serving support for OS/400 servers, will not be supported on PC clients running Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows ME with OS/400 V5R3 and higher. Desktops and servers running Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Linux (when equipped with the open source Samba print and file server) will continue to support iSeries NetServer, in OS/400 V5R3 and higher.
In an unspecified future OS/400 release, which could be OS/400 V5R3 in 2003 or V5R4 in 2004, IBM will remove its own HTTP Server, which is the original Web server IBM bundle with OS/400 back in the late 1990s and which has been enhanced many times since then, from OS/400. IBM has been shipping the Apache 2 Web server, which became available in April, as an alternative to its own HTTP Server program, and has made it clear that over the long haul, once it tweaked and tuned Apache and OS/400 to run well together, it would make Apache the only Web server available on OS/400.
V5R2 will be the final OS/400 release to include XML for C++ parsers and procedural parsers as part of OS/400. These are now included in the QSYS library. IBM has made comparable XML for C++ and procedural parsers available in the XML Toolkit for iSeries (5733-XT1), a program that was announced in early April and which costs $250.
On the System/3X front, OS/400 V5R2 will be the last OS/400 release to support the System/36 and System/38 Migration option that has been a part of OS/400 since 1988. V5R2 will also be the last release to support the System/36 Migration Assistant and the use of the RSTS36FLR command from SSP, the System/36's operating system, within OS/400 to restore System/36 folders.
V5R2 will be the last OS/400 release to support Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) hardware and software. This technology, while all the rage a number of years ago, has been superseded by virtual private networking derived from high-speed versions of Internet protocols.
OS/400 V5R1, which started shipping a year ago, was supposed to be the last OS/400 release to support the PCI-based feature 2761 and 4761 analog modem adapters. This support has now been extended into OS/400 V5R2. If enough customers complain, it could end up in V5R3, too. But don't count on it.