The Four Hundred--Future iSeries Servers, Part 4

I never get tired of talking about the iSeries, and I sure hope you don't get tired of reading about IBM's plans for future versions of the box. For the past several weeks, I have written about the hardware underlying future iSeries servers, I/O technologies, and packaging. This week, in the final essay in this series, I want to talk about on-demand computing and systems management and the innovations that IBM has in store for the iSeries and for its eServers.

As we all know by now, IBM is on this "on demand" kick, and it seems to mean a lot of different things to a lot of different IBMers. What "On Demand" (which is in caps here this one time in this story because it is a Big IBM Idea) really means is flexible, adaptive, self-administering IT systems. This is a very good idea, and it will be very hard to attain. We at Guild Companies put "on demand" in lowercase letters because it is an approach to technology, like capacity on demand is. Only successful technologies that are pervasive are worthy of capital letters and TLAs (three-letter acronyms). All major Unix and proprietary server vendors have capacity on demand, which means they put a few extra processors in the box and let you activate them as you need to, in order to cope with workload spikes. One IBMer I was corresponding with, via Instant Messenger, accidentally typed On Dement, and I thought that was one of the funniest things I had seen in a while.

As I have said in past issues of this newsletter that IBM is looking for a Big Idea on which to hang a lot of hardware, software, and services. Like it did with e-business. Great marketing, to be sure, but has the iSeries really changed that much from the AS/400? Does dynamic logical partitioning and support of native Linux really represent a paradigm shift? I don't think so. And by the way, neither does Adaptive Enterprise (Hewlett-Packard's answer to "on demand"), Dynamic Systems Initiative (by Microsoft), or N1 (by Sun Microsystems). Most analysts (including myself) call such over-arching (I think over-reaching) initiatives by rude names in conversation. I hadn't thought of "On Dement" yet, but I like that. I call Microsoft's DSI "dizzy," because Microsoft hasn't a clue about how to do some of the sophisticated things that OS/400 and its iSeries servers can. I like "Adopt-an-Enterprise," to mock what HP is trying to do (which seems kind of vague, just like "On Dement"). And "N-Yet" is what I call N1 from Sun, because, like all of these other initiatives, it ain't here yet.

Forget all the schmarketing. What on demand means is that IBM is going to get its act together and try to make its servers, storage, operating systems, and middleware a lot easier to administer and more flexible in terms of configuration and pricing. IBM has to do this, as do all other platform providers, because the human cost of computing has either stayed constant or gone up, while the cost of systems has dropped like a rock but their complexity has grown. Automating the computers is the only option, but the funny thing about computers is that the systems we build are such devilish contraptions that they are difficult to automate. In fact, they are difficult just to keep running. This means that many of you systems administrators, operators, and programmers are going to have jobs for a while yet. So breathe easy. When any of these vendors show me a machine that can really manage itself, like the press releases claim, I already will have launched a different, non-IT publishing business. So there.

The iSeries team in Rochester, Minnesota, has to talk the On Demand talk and walk the On Demand walk. That's the IBM way. And they are working on some cool stuff as part of this whole on-demand initiative. They might have done these things anyway, but now they are getting done with a certain amount of vim and vigor.

The most obvious future technology that is coming as part of the on-demand initiative is a new hypervisor for the "Squadron" Power5 and future Power-based servers that will be able to support OS/400, AIX, and Linux concurrently on the same machine, within much more flexible and much more granular logical partitions. This means OS/400 partitions running DB2/400 will be able to sit side-by-side with AIX partitions, running popular non-IBM Unix databases from Oracle and Sybase, as well IBM's own DB2 and Informix databases. What's equally important is that a whole slew of specialized Unix applications for data warehousing and technical computing will be, for the first time, available on the same box for OS/400 shops. Those AIX and OS/400 partitions will share virtualized I/O, and will communicate through the memory buses in the iSeries box, using virtualized LAN links. This is going to be a great thing for lots of customers who have a mix of OS/400 and Unix applications. There will be a place for Linux applications on this Power5 iSeries, too, mostly supporting Web infrastructure workloads, like Web servers, firewalls, load balancers, and such. If real Linux applications take off in the market, the iSeries will be able to run them on the same machine. In short, the Power5 iSeries will give customers a single box that lets them be relatively agnostic about the operating systems they put on that box. (It would be nice if native Windows were in the mix, too. But that's up to Bill Gates, not Sam Palmisano.)

Of course, making an iSeries box that supports all of these environments presents a daunting challenge to IBM and, more important, to its iSeries customers. Each of those platforms has its own set of management tools. What customers really need is a flexible systems-management tool that masks these differences.

That's exactly what IBM is working on. According to the people I have spoken with inside IBM, Big Blue is working on a converged systems-management tool that merges Management Central on the iSeries with IBM Director on the xSeries and Cluster Systems Management on Linux clusters, as well as integrating with Tivoli products (including the new Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator virtualization and provisioning software that IBM got through its acquisition of Think Dynamics earlier this year). This converged systems management program is based on IBM's own WebSphere Portal Server, and is being created by the iSeries team in Rochester and the xSeries team in Raleigh, North Carolina. It's based heavily on the ideas that went into the iSeries Navigator program, which puts a Windows-style GUI on the front end of OS/400. It will also take ideas from the Integrated Solutions Console, created by IBM's Software Group and recently put out in alpha form on the company's alphaWorks Web site. With the Think Dynamics program merged into this tool, servers will be able to allocate resources (including new instances of an OS/400, AIX, or Linux operating system running on iSeries partitions) based on policies set in the tool by administrators. It will, presumably, be able to do a lot of predictive analysis and self-optimization in order to tweak performance to meet service-level agreements with company departments or customers. This is the real Holy Grail in IT, and it remains elusive.

In any event, the first incarnation of this new IBM management tool will come out in 2004. This tool will apparently consist of a management server that can run on any real machine in the network or on any virtual machine in an iSeries partition. Each unique machine or partition will have a management agent installed, which feeds information back to the management server. IBM will probably keep the ISC moniker for it, but could try to come up with something else, like On Demand Manager or something silly like that.