The Four Hundred

A serious business requires a serious machine, and what better place to showcase a serious business machine like the new iSeries Model 890 than LinuxWorld, where last week IBM demonstrated the new 32-way, Power4-based server, which starts shipping in volume on August 30? OK, so Linux hasn't fully overcome its reputation as a product of the counterculture, but it has gained credibility among serious businessmen during the last year. A good indicator of this trend, as IBM's Craig Johnson observed, was the noticeable lack of multi-color hairdos at the show.

Johnson, IBM's product marketing manager for iSeries Linux, went to the show in San Francisco with a group of staffers from Rochester, Minnesota, to demonstrate the new Model 890, code-named the "Regatta-H," which they configured to run several iSeries Linux applications in various logical partitions. It was the first public demonstration of the new i890 since it was announced at the end of April.

Compared with other LinuxWorlds, this show had a more professional atmosphere, said Johnson from the floor of his fourth LinuxWorld. There are more business people at this show than in the past, he said, adding, "I haven't seen anybody with colored hair yet."

But it wasn't Big Blue's button-down temperament, so much as its reputation for big iron, that drew people to its booth. In addition to the 32-way i890, IBM had at its booth a new pSeries 670 (also known as the "Regatta-M"), as well as zSeries 800 ("Raptor") and zSeries 900 ("Freeway") mainframes and a 48-node xSeries cluster running Linux. You have to know something about IBM's product lines to see this, since the i890, p670, and zSeries mainframes all look like identical eServers from the outside. Johnson had to tell people what kind of server they were looking at. "People will look inside [the i890] and say, 'Hey, this is Regatta; it looks like a pSeries,' " he said. "No, this is iSeries running OS/400 and Linux."

Vision used IBM's box to demonstrate Orion, its new high-availability software for OS/400, Linux, and Unix operating systems. Orion, which Vision hasn't yet made available, was used to automate the handling of failovers from one iSeries Linux partition to another. The same box was used to demonstrate the new Linux ERP software that MAPICS started shipping in the spring. MAPICS ERP for iSeries now includes an option to use a Java-based application server that runs in Linux partitions and connects to the back-end OS/400 database. At the show, eOneGroup had a live connection to the iSeries server of its customer zipper-maker YKK USA. YKK, you'll recall from the article "All the Pleasure of iSeries Linux, Without the OS/400," used eOneGroup's Web site development software, eOneCommerce, to develop a Web portal for customers that connects to the company's homegrown, RPG-based ERP app.

Even with all these applications running, there was plenty of room on the i890 for other demonstrations. ("We're not even approaching taxing it at all," Johnson said of the i890. "We have more processors on the floor than disk drives.") Johnson and his team demonstrated how to configure Linux in logical partitions and dynamically reallocate resources to logical partitions using iSeries Navigator, the graphical systems management interface that was called Operations Navigator before OS/400 V5R2, which also ships at the end of August. They also showed how easy it is to load Turbolinux onto the box. It only takes about two minutes, Johnson said.

IBM also had marketing handouts to give to people at the show. One of the handouts was a case study describing how the Bank of Brazil is using several iSeries Model 820s to consolidate its Windows servers using iSeries Linux and the integrated xSeries Window server cards for the iSeries. Another case study highlighted YKK USA's successes with its dedicated iSeries Linux servers (which IBM calls iSeries Linux Editions).

IBM's growing list of Linux reference accounts indicates the growing acceptance of Linux in the enterprise. And, in a large way, that was the basic message coming from LinuxWorld, which featured key notes from the chief executives of Sun Microsystems and Oracle, that Linux is ready for prime time.

But you can never forget who brought you to the dance. As the show was winding down last Thursday, there were no reports of the types of pranks pulled at LinuxWorld in the past. For instance, at the spring 2001 LinuxWorld show, in San Francisco, IBM made headlines when its ad firm, Ogilvy and Mather, contracted with locals of The City--some of whom were probably counter-culture Linux programmers from the Haight-Asbhury district, who had dyed hair and body piercings to boot--to spray-paint IBM's "Peace, Love, Linux" emblems on city sidewalks. City officials forced IBM to clean up the graffiti, but the stunt lives on as Big Blue's most creative marketing campaign in recent memory.