Comments on: System i blades not selling yet, it seems http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/iseries/system-i-blades-not-selling-yet-it-seems/ A Search400.com blog Mon, 30 Jul 2012 20:55:50 +0000 hourly 1 By: Norman Wilder http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/iseries/system-i-blades-not-selling-yet-it-seems/#comment-492 Norman Wilder Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:35:54 +0000 http://iseries.blogs.techtarget.com/2008/06/12/system-i-blades-not-selling-yet-it-seems/#comment-492 We are a small shop and are very interested in the blade but information is hard to come by. Our IBM Business Partner has no knowledge of (or interest in) blade servers so they are not going to push the blade servers until customer’s demand forces them to. The vendor also has not certified the software to run on the new OS so we can’t do anything until that happens.

Even getting information from IBM is difficult. IBM Blade server people have little knowledge of the AS/400 side and vice versa. This will increase the acceptance time for the product.

We have been researching costs and capability of the blade server and are by no means finished because of the difficulty og getting information. At present, based on the information we have, it appears that the intiial cost of the chassis and a DS3000 SAN will approximate the cost of replacing the AS/400 with a standalone box. Cost saving should appear in the future as new capacity is added as modules rather than having to replace the entire system

One thing that we dislike it that the JS12 blade will only fit the the S chassis and the JS22 blade will only fit the H chassis. We need the H chassis for capacity for windows servers and to have some space for growth but the we only need to activate one of the four processors on the blade.

We are concerned with how long IBM can keep the AS/400 line going. It really doesn’t have a niche anymore since smal IBM mainframes are priced competively with the large AS/400s and do not have the capacity brick wall. Intel boxes can easily replace the small AS/400s and a much cheaper price. There is no new software development of the AS/400 and existing software is being replaced on different platforms. Where does this leave the AS/400 in the long run?

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