But Wait, There's More

What i5/OS V5R3M5 Is All About

Just in case you missed it in last week's edition of Four Hundred Stuff, IBM had some minor iSeries product announcements and divulged what on earth i5/OS V5R3M5 is. We wanted to make sure you saw the story explaining what the deal is, which you can read by clicking here. In short, i5/OS V5R3M5 is an update of the microcode for i5/OS V5R3 that will allow an iSeries box to boot remotely from a storage area network rather than from a set of local disk drives under the skins of the iSeries server. Read on if you need to know more. Other IBM iSeries-related announcements are contained in this issue's But Wait, There's More section, so read on.

Sundry IBM iSeries Announcements Last Week

October 4th might have been one of the quietest iSeries announcement days in the 17-year history of the product line. As we reported above, IBM is offering a boot-over-SAN capability for the i5 line thanks to some new microcode and a new IOP. In addition, IBM made some other changes. There is a new feature 4813 Integrated xSeries Server coprocessor that, at least as far as I can tell, is absolutely technically identical to the feature 4812 co-processor that IBM announced almost a year ago. Feature 4812 had a single 2 GHz Pentium M processor, 1 GB of main memory, and two Gigabit Ethernet ports; it cost $2,780. Both features require an IOP and both take up two PCI slots. The only difference I can see in the IBM sales manual is this: "The #4813 is a #4812 encased in a double wide blind swap cassette." The first person who explains to me what that is--without calling IBM--gets a Prickett Morgan's Finest London Porter by mail. If I beat you to finding out, I drink the beer.

First, IBM in now offering 200 GB LTO tape drive (feature 5755) as an option on i5 systems. This drive, which offers 400 GB per tape capacity and 48 MB/sec of data transfer speed with compression turned on, can read both LTO-1 and LTO-2 tapes. It plugs into a 5.25-inch media bay in the i5 and costs $5,200. Feature 7997 is a new redundant service processor for the i5 570, which only had one service processor. People are using the i5 570s as the core systems, which stands to reason since it scales up to 16 Power5 processor cores. You want spare system components in such machines, and IBM is offering them as an option. The spare service processor costs $650. IBM also rolled out a new PCI expansion drawer, feature 5790, that is a 4U rack-mounted chassis that attaches to the i5 through a Remote I/O (RIO) or High Speed Link (HSL) bus and provides six PCI-X expansion slots; it costs $7,000, which seems a bit high to me for a de-glorified motherboard (meaning there is no CPU and no memory) and a case. The new feature 7311 is a dual I/O unit enclosure for the i5, which can house two 5790 I/O drawers side-by-side in a rack; it costs $417.

i5/OS Races Down the Straightaway with ProData's Hartley

Last week, Allen Hartley, the owner of ProData Computer Services, hosted 35 iSeries customers, vendors, and IBMers for the Ameriquest Mortage National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) Nationals at Route 66 Raceway in Joliet, Ill. But the i5 community wasn't just a spectator in this race, as Hartley Racing's red and black striped Top Fuel dragster went speeding down the centerline emblazoned with the familiar i5/OS logo painted on the sides of the car.

Hartley Racing's pit crew

Besides creating ProData's DBU product, Allen Hartley is the Hartley Racing team owner as well as a veteran racecar driver who has been racing since the early 1970s. His son, Joe, now drives the family race car, a Top Fuel dragster that runs on nitro-methane, which generates about 8000 horsepower to accelerate the car to speeds over 300 miles per hour. Looking fast even when standing still, the Hartley dragster is closely associated with DBU and i5/OS, with the i5/OS logo decorating the car and the car appearing prominently in ProData ads and on the Web site. The car has also been displayed at recent COMMON expos.

Burning Serious Rubber (Note the i5/OS logos on the dragster, which Hartley Racing is doing for free)

Hartley reserved a skybox for his guests, which included visitors from IBM, RPGWorld, LANSA, Advanced Systems Concepts, and customers from companies like Hormel and Graycor. IBM's Frank Soltis, the iSeries chief architect, and his sons, who also race Porsches in back in Minnesota, got even closer to the action when they stationed themselves at the starting line as the Hartley dragster took off. (ProData even gave me tickets, and a colleague and I had a great time at the drag races. This was definitely better than staring at a computer screen all day, no matter how much you like i5/OS.)

ProData has hosted this event in other racing venues, and the company wouldn't mind if it grew into an IBM business partner event in some of the other 23 cities that the NHRA races in.

Low Interest Rate Deal from Big Blue Gets a Little Less Low

That Low Rate Financing deal that IBM has been touting on and off for a few years to help it peddle hardware and software just got a little less low. In January 2005, IBM had lowered rates to stimulate demand, and in April and then again in July it pushed them a tiny bit above the levels rates were at before it dropped them in January and quite a bit higher than what Big Blue was charging in the summer of 2004.

The Low Rate Financing deal has let companies buying from $25,000 to $1 million in hardware finance it under what IBM calls low rates; those buying pSeries products get the same rates, but get a sweetened deal that can span up to $2 million in a single deal. The rate for pSeries, iSeries, zSeries, and xSeries servers and their associated storage is now 4.25 percent (up from 4.1 percent in April and up from 3 percent in May 2004). Software and consulting contracts from the Business Consulting Services line at IBM's Global Services group can be financed at 4.55 percent, with Integrated Technology Services financed at 5.05 percent. IBM is not selling PCs any more, so they are not in this deal. These low rates are only offered for qualified customers (meaning those with decent credit and solid financials), and they are only available on capital leases with a 24- to-36-month term with a $1 end-of-lease payout. This deal runs through December 31, and is retroactive to October 1.

IBM Debuts New Half and Quarter Racks for the i5s and p5s

Just because everybody loves rack-mounted servers these days does not mean that everyone needs a big 42U rack in their data center. And that is why IBM is introducing some smaller half and quarter racks for the iSeries and pSeries server lines. Specifically, feature 0554 is an 11U (24 inches) rack suitable for entry and midrange customers, while feature 0555 is a 25U (49 inches) rack. Both racks can be equipped with various i5 and p5 rack-mounted servers as well as power distribution units, disk arrays, and so forth. The 11U rack costs $1,129, while the 25U rack costs $1,999.

SSA Global Rejiggers Its Board, Adds Ex-IBMer and ex-CEO of Siebel Systems

ERP software maker SSA Global has added some big guns to its board of directors. Mike Lawrie, who used to head up IBM's worldwide sales organization and who took the job as the CEO of Siebel Systems as that company was running against the rocks back in May 2004. After Siebel missed a few quarters, Lawrie stepped down from Siebel in April 2005, and it wasn't too long before Oracle's Larry Ellison stepped in and explained to former employee and Siebel founder Tom Siebel that he had an offer that Siebel--both the company and the man--couldn't refuse: $5.85 billion and Siebel gets eaten by Oracle.

Howard Cohen, formerly president and CEO of Gtech Corporation (NYSE), a $1 billion global information technology and infrastructure management company, has also joined the board. Cohen has also been president and CEO of Bell and Howell Corporation, Sidus Systems Corporation, and Peak Technologies, all high-tech firms. Lawrie and Cohen will replace SSA board members Bill Ford and Raymond Wechsler, who are resigning from the board because of pressing responsibilities with their own businesses.

Power.org Adds More Members

The Power.org community of hardware and software vendors that are building solutions based on IBM's Power architecture held a conference in Shanghai, China, recently, creating new working groups to foster the creation of Power-based solutions and added eight new members of the organization.

Power.org is not a consortium, which would have the power to direct the development of the Power platform, but is rather a collection of Power enthusiasts who use their indirect influence with Big Blue to get it to push the Power architecture in specific ways and into specific markets. It is more like a political party than a ruling government in this regard. Nonetheless, it is a useful way for IBM to open itself up to the advice of partners as it seeks to push the Power architecture into new place.

The two most interesting new members of the community are Terra Soft Solutions and Genesi. Terra Soft is a commercial Linux distributor founded in 1999 that is focused solely on the Power platform with its Yellow Dog Linux, and has been one of the main benefactors of Apple's use of Power chips in its desktops and servers. But with Apple moving to Intel chips starting next year, Terra Soft needs to get its own platforms together. This is exactly what the company plans to do, and it is working with Merucry Computer Systems to deliver the XR9 rack-mounted server, which has two 2.4 GHz PowerPC 970FX processors in 1U and 4U form factors, running Yellow Dog Linux. The XR9 will use HyperTransport and PCI-X buses (which is interesting), with optional InfiniBand interconnections. It will also have two Gigabit Ethernet ports. Genesi is a maker of small form factor motherboards based on PowerPC processors (called PegasosPPC) and a Linux workstation based on these boards (called the Open Desktop Workstation). Genesi already sells products based on the PowerPC G4 processors, and said that it would be developing a product called the Open Server Workstation that will be based on two dual-core PowerPC 970MP processors. The other new Power.org members are CipherOptics (a provider of data security and encryption solutions), CriticalBlue (which creates special co-processors that embed the functions of software to create offload engines), Mentor Graphics (an electronic design automation software provider), Silicon Application Corporation (a semiconductor supply chain services provider), Tehuti Networks (a fabless semiconductor designer), and Virtutech (a developer of simulation software that emulates systems-level software on specific computing architectures). The latter is also interesting in that IBM was using Virtutech to simulate the running of its Virtualization Engine hypervisor on future Power6 processors--before they even went to first silicon.