iSeries Announcement Roundup

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Well, it's after Labor Day, and summer is officially over. That must mean that we have entered IBM announcement season. While IBM has often made major OS/400 platform announcements in the fall, the company seems to be saving spring of 2004 for OS/400 V5R3 and whatever iSeries hardware announcements it has in the works. That's not to say that IBM isn't doing anything this September. It is.

Last Friday was the official launch day for two variants on the iSeries that Big Blue started talking about in July in a product preview: the iSeries for Capacity BackUp and the iSeries for High Availability. These machines both will be generally available on September 12. IBM's product preview in July meant that the announcement would happen within the next six months, so it looks like IBM moved this one up a little.

Here's the recap on these two machines for those of you who missed the July announcements, which, like last Friday's announcements, were done with less than the usual fanfare. I'll give you the low-down on pricing as well, which is what we didn't know a few weeks ago.

The iSeries for Capacity BackUp is an iSeries Model 825, 870, or 890 server configured with the minimum number of processors activated (that's 3, 5, 8, 16, or 24 base processors, depending on the machine). The Capacity BackUp machine will be stored off-site, and in the event of a natural disaster-- like a tornado, a fire, a flood, or a blackout--customers will be able to activate more processors (up to 6, 8, 16, 24, or 32, again depending on the machine) on the backup iSeries box to run their applications. This gives them time to restore their production machine or to acquire a new one if it is destroyed.

With the iSeries for Capacity BackUp box, customers obviously must replicate data from their production machines to this backup iSeries server. According to Steve Finnes, high availability product manager for the iSeries line at IBM, customers can replicate their data using their own code or that of any third-party replication software supplier. The obvious choices for data replication software in the OS/400 market are (in alphabetical order) DataMirror, iTera, Lakeview Technology, Maximum Availability, and Vision Solutions.

The iSeries for Capacity BackUp servers run a stripped down version of OS/400 Enterprise Edition, which includes full-tilt 5250 processing capability. This backup iSeries machine can not be used for anything other than replicating data and applications and then activating itself to run those applications when a production machine is wiped out by a natural disaster. IBM says that a natural disaster is an outage of more than four hours that is not the result of normal hardware or software failures. IBM says that the processors in the Capacity BackUp server cannot be permanently activated. So don't think you can turn it into a production machine without spending more money if a disaster strikes. IBM will apparently offer customers real upgrades from the Capacity BackUp server to real iSeries machines running OS/400 Enterprise Edition. What those upgrade charges will be is unclear, but it will probably be the difference in list price between the backup and the real iSeries machines.

If customers can get by with the base number of processors in the backup box during a disaster, they obviously do not have to activate standby Power4 processors. But if they need to activate more CPUs to handle their workloads, they will have to pay for those processors on a daily basis. Remember that IBM's daily usage fees for processors are roughly the list price cost of acquiring the CPU on a Model 825, 870, or 890 server divided by 45 days of usage. That works out to $1,100 per day for the Model 825, $1,200 per day for the Model 870, and $1,300 per day for the Model 890. This is not cheap, but not having a backup server can cost big bucks in lost revenues, too.

On a per-CPW basis, the base Capacity BackUp boxes have worse price/performance than a regular iSeries machine in the same class running OS/400 Enterprise Edition. But the initial cash outlay for these machines is much lower than for iSeries boxes running OS/400 Enterprise Edition. Prices for the iSeries for Capacity BackUp servers are, as the table I built shows, roughly somewhere between the prices of a box running OS/400 Standard Edition and OS/400 Enterprise Edition. This is what IBM was hinting it would do back in July. (The Model 870 backup box actually has a lower list price than the Model 870 box running OS/400 Standard Edition, on which it is based, but that backup box only has two processors activated, compared with the base of eight processors on the real iSeries running either OS/400 Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition.) The Model 890 backup box with four processors activated, at $900,000, costs only 35 percent as much as a 24-way real Model 890 running OS/400 Enterprise Edition, which costs $2.55 million. But its bang for the buck is almost half that of a real iSeries machine. IBM is clearly charging a premium for these machines, but it is probably one that many OS/400 sites will find reasonable as they try to avoid downtime. Having hot backups in a service bureau isn't cheap, either, and this way customers know they have a machine waiting for them when a disaster strikes. You can't always count on disaster recovery firms having a machine available, even if you pay for it, during a widespread natural disaster.

The iSeries for High Availability is likewise based on the iSeries Model 825, 870, and 890 servers running OS/400 Enterprise Edition. If the iSeries for Capacity BackUp machine is aimed at protecting against natural disasters, the high availability box aims to protect against outages related to planned downtime (during upgrades and data archiving, for instance) and for unplanned outages (usually caused by software crashes or human error).

As the table shows, there are five different models of the iSeries for High Availability servers. Unlike the backup boxes, companies are expected to use them for production work, in addition to failover clustering. The machines are priced at a discount, compared with iSeries servers running OS/400 Enterprise Edition, yet offer most of the same functionality of a real Power4-based iSeries box, including full 5250 support. Some of the software bundled into the real Enterprise Edition--such as WebSphere Portal Server--is not included in the high availability box.

So just how good are the prices on iSeries high-availability boxes compared with real iSeries machines running OS/400 Enterprise Edition? IBM is offering a 38 percent discount on the Model 825 high-availability box. Discounts are between 31 and 34 percent on the Model 870 versions, and are between 21 and 25 percent on the Model 890 versions. I have to believe discounts will be quite a bit deeper on the bigger iSeries high-availability machines: to about 40 percent is my guess. I don't expect IBM to give much with the Model 825 high-availability box.

IBM has been saying that the iSeries high-availability boxes will formalize the special deals it has been running for as long as I can remember to help promote the use of high-availability software on the AS/400 and iSeries platform. To buy one of these machines, customers have to be using the cluster-enabled high-availability software from DataMirror, Lakeview Technology, or Vision Solutions. IBM's Finnes says that neither Maximum Availability nor iTera high-availability solutions qualify for the iSeries high-availability box, and he was not able to provide full details on the criteria for qualification at press time. But he did say that IBM was inviting all interested parties to get qualified so they could help iSeries resellers and IBM push these new high-availability machines.

Other Interesting Things IBM Is Announcing

While the iSeries for Capacity BackUp and iSeries for High Availability servers are the big news IBM will announce at the COMMON midrange trade show this week in Orlando, Florida, there are some other smaller announcements that IBM will be making.

• DB2 Universal Database 8.1 for Linux is now available for Linux on iSeries partitions, and will be included, without a charge, on iSeries Model 825, 870, and 890 servers running OS/400 Enterprise Edition. The version IBM is shipping for iSeries Linux partitions is the DB2 Workgroup Server Edition, which can scale up to only four processors. Pricing for DB2 for Linux on the iSeries was not available at press time, but it seems likely that the price would be the same as DB2 for Linux or AIX on the same S-Star- or Power4-class iron for those customers who want to run it on an iSeries box equipped with Standard Edition or on the Model 800 and Model 810 servers that do not have it for free as part of their bundle.
• WebSphere Portal Express Version 5.0 and WebSphere Portal Express-Plus Version 5.0 are now available on the iSeries. The software can be acquired under user-based or processor-based pricing schemes.
• The full WebSphere Application Server Version 5.0 is no longer part of the OS/400 Enterprise Edition software bundle. Only WebSphere Express is, and sources at IBM say that most new customers were opting for WebSphere Express anyway. IBM has added DB2 for Linux and XML Toolkit for iSeries to the Enterprise Edition mix. Customers wanting the full WebSphere application server for OS/400 Enterprise Edition are going to have to pay for it.
• IBM will ship a new set of PCI-X disk array and tape drive adapter feature cards. The prior generation of adapter cards was based on PCI, which has lower bandwidth. The exact feature numbers and prices for these new cards were not available at press time. I'll give you the lowdown on these cards next week.
• IBM will also ship a new Integrated xSeries Server (IxS) coprocessor for the iSeries based on the 2 GHz Xeon DP processor. Like the 1.6 GHz coprocessor, the new one will support up to 4 GB of main memory and can address up to 2 TB of disk capacity inside the iSeries. The new 2 GHz IxS requires OS/400 V5R2 and only plugs into iSeries boxes. Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows 2003 Standard Edition, and Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition are supported on the new IxS; Windows NT 4.0 is not.
• Al Zollar, general manager of the iSeries division, will announce at the COMMON show that IBM Lotus Domino 6.5, which has been in beta-testing for some time, will begin shipping on September 30. IBM plans to integrate Sametime instant messaging into the Notes client with this release. Domino Web Access will support Web browsers based on the open-source Mozilla browser, which includes those sold by Netscape. Mozilla is a popular browser for Linux but is also available on Windows PCs. With support for Mozilla, Notes/Domino can now be accessed on Linux clients. Domino 6.5 will also allow different releases and versions of Domino to coexist on the same iSeries server. And, with Domino 6.5, Lotus Enterprise Integrator, which is a tool for extracting data from databases so it can be used by Domino applications, can talk to databases other than IBM's DB2, including Oracle and SQL Server. This capability has been in the Unix and Windows versions of Domino for some time.

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