System i hardware

Planning for Power7: Some technology considerations

IBM has published a statement of direction on its web site that starts to spell out the direction it’s going with the System i. Hat tip to IT Jungle for pointing this out. Here are the statements, step by step:

If you want to upgrade from a Power5 machine to Power7, the only way you can preserve the serial number is by first upgrading to Power6, and then to Power7. Why is the serial number important? From IT Jungle:

This serial number thing is important for the accountants and the tax man. (If you don’t preserve the serial number, you have to write off the full value of the initial asset at the time of the upgrade.)

Power7 hardware will support the existing 12X I/O drawers, according to the statement of direction. Older I/O drawers that were supported on Power6 and earlier hardware — RIO/HSL-attached I/O drawers — will not be supported. In the statement, IBM “suggests” that Power6 users upgrade to the 12X I/O drawers now in anticipation of an eventual upgrade.

IT Jungle calls 12X I/O drawers “gussied up” InfiniBand, and had this to say about the potential future of I/O on i:

I think IBM will have to move to QDR InfiniBand for I/O drawer links for a simple reason. The PCI-Express 2.0 peripheral slot standard has a peak data rate of 40 Gigabits/sec. If you don’t have a faster and wider network pipe, the I/O is going to flood it. And when the I/O pipes are flooded, expensive multicore processors like Power7 chips spin their cycles and do not work. As a wise man once said, all computers wait at precisely the same speed. . . . And waiting is the one thing system engineers have to design out of the box.

The statement of direction also says that Power6 machines will be the last hardware to support a number of storage and networking technologies: SCSI drives that are 36 GB or less or 10K RPM SCSI drives; quarter-inch cartridge tape drives, and I/O Processor (IOP) and IOP-based PCI cards.

Bob Cancilla on the future of System i

System i fan but realist Bob Cancilla, who runs the i-Nsider blog that has stirred the System i masses as of late, had this to say about the future of the platform while talking to IT Jungle:

“My points are not about the value or the quality of IBM i–the OS. This is about IBM’s commitment to the system. IBM is simply not investing in the OS or products related to or running on the OS. No one is selling IBM i, and a business without new customers is a business that is dying. The IBM i OS is gradually fading away because IBM is not selling it. Since there is no longer an organization to sell IBM i, there can be no turn around or return to prominence. It will simply continue to decline in users and will most definitely be dropped by IBM when the revenue reaches a point where it is no longer feasible to continue supporting it.”

System i decline, modernization, and the next 5 years

Bob Cancilla, a former executive in the Rational division of IBM, has started a new blog up in representation of his new company, Reno-based application modernization provider Oxford International. Cancilla opened up his blog with a bang, saying that the IBM i operating system and the RPG programming language are in a state of deep decline with not a lot of support within the IBM organization.

But in addition to decrying the state of the platform, Cancilla offers up possibilities for keeping it alive. You’ll never guess what he suggests. Or maybe you will. That’s right, application modernization! The exact line of business that his new company is in.

Nevertheless, Cancilla has some interesting points about the IBM i platform along with some valuable insights having been there for four years. Here are a few of his suggestions:

Before joining IBM I was CTO for a major insurance company where I ran a development organization that did major in-house development. Our project funding was totally tied to current business objectives and funded by various departments or in certain cases approved by the steering committee by special corporate funding for projects that crossed organizational lines.

What I did not have was money to fund an IT technology project. Even our Y2K work had to be tied into business objectives.

I think that many of your are like I was and have to integrate your modernization initiatives into currently funded projects. I can tell you that my management would never have funded a major conversion initiative as a standalone project. The only way to fund modernization was to show a business need or financial benefit.

Some System i’ers “pilgrimage” to Rochester

At the end of last month, the two writers at iDevelop described their visit to Rochester, Minn., the technological home of the IBM System i platform, and a place close to the hearts of many System i enthusiasts.

There’s no doubt that many people in the System i industry have an emotional — might I even say spiritual — attraction to Rochester, and in particular its various big, blue buildings with names such as “Building 006″ and “Building 025.” Here’s an excerpt:

As big and blue as the buildings are, it’s the people at IBM in Rochester that make the trip truly worthwhile. There are great IBMers everywhere, but in Rochester there is always a feeling of being among kindred spirits like nowhere else we’ve been. Things are changing a little now that it’s all supposed to be about “Power Systems” but we suspect that many of the longtime IBMers in Rochester feel like we do–it’s really all about i.

And later, the writer talk about some of the things they might be doing off-campus:

We’ve already managed to spend some quality time with longtime friends, and the week has just begun. We have so much to look forward to–walking around Silverlake, visiting Andy’s (the local wine store), eating at John Hardy’s BBQ, watching the human foosball tournament at lunch time. … And most importantly of all, communing with many fellow fans of the greatest system a business can buy.

Tip: If you’re going to visit, go now. Better than in January when, as one commenter put it, the winds are howling and it feels like minus 70 degrees.

The converged 520 and 550 Power systems

IBM cuts prices to a bunch of Power Systems upgrades

Big Blue has slashed prices for most of 20 different upgrades on Power Systems, some by as much as 54%. Some of the upgrades include moving from a Power 5+ processor to a Power 6, and adding memory. There are two upgrade changes that are price increases.

The announcement letter has a list of all the price changes, but there is also a more detailed look at what the feature upgrades are.

IBM i: The tree falling in the forest?

The writers at iDevelop bring up an interesting analogy: Is the IBM i — and its many feature sets — becoming like the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it?

As proof, the blog cites an example of their own ignorance of a particular IBM i feature. Take a look:

Case in point. We try to keep up with the majority of new stuff, particularly in as much as it affects application development, but we missed this one. It concerns the ability of an RPG program to directly create PDF files. This topic is near and dear to the hearts of many of our clients and often comes up in internet lists. Yet we’ve seen nothing about this–it is buried in the “What’s New” documentation and even once we knew that it was there it still took some time to find it.

This goes beyond just RPG abilities on the System i, of course. If IBM isn’t out there selling the System i to anyone other than people already on the System i, who even knows about it? The tree falling in the forest is slowly disappearing because there are fewer and fewer people around to hear it fall.

The Smart Cube i now on sale in the U.S.

We reported on the IBM Smart Cube i back in December, noting that IBM seemed to want to keep the product secret from many, though it was rolling it out mainly in India. The Smart Cube is almost like a server appliance for the System i, and here are some of the details:

• Three Power-based configurations, with one, two or four processing cores activated.
• Can run IBM i, AIX or Linux using 4.2 GHz Power6 chips
• Includes a stack of systems and application software called the Smart Business Software Pack for i, which runs on the IBM i 6.1 OS

Now the Smart Cube is apparently being rolled out in the United States. The U.S. version, according to the story, has 17 ISVs that are configuring the cubes to run combinations of 45 different applications.

More details on the Power6+ System i boxes

Timothy Prickett Morgan has a good, detailed article on Power6+ midrange servers — the 520, 550, 560 and JS23 and JS43 blades. The servers will be available on May 22 and run on System i 6.1, but unavailable on i5/OS V5R4. The new servers will also support AIX 5.3, AIX 6.1, Novell SLES 10 or later and RHEL 4 Update 5 or later.

IBM not marketing System i technology as it should

Trevor Perry has a belated analysis of the merger between System i and System p into Power Systems, but it comes about because of a recent trip he made in South Africa last month. Bottom line: Perry thinks System i folks need to stop talking about the name, and IBM needs to market the System i technology on equal footing with AIX and the former System p brand.

IBM also promised us that there would be marketing of Power Systems with all three OSs mentioned - AIX, IBM i and Linux. This promise remains unfulfilled on the outside of IBM, with no apparent marketing to support the premise that IBM i is the OS “for business”. Even the Power Systems home page at IBM does not show the three logos together.

It is no wonder that IBM i continues to be pushed out the door. Most people consider the AS/400 to be old and worthy of replacing with non-IBM i systems. Our community indulges themselves in the safety net of calling it an AS/400, only to find themselves without a job, and without a future.

Do we still have time to restore IBM i to the glory of the legacy it has left? Probably not… But we ~can~ turn around the impression that we work on an OLD system, with OLD tools, building OLD applications.

In South Africa, Perry spoke with companies still stuck with AS/400s, coding like it is still 1999, and in general, not keeping up with modern technology. As a result, one IT director there felt he had two options — outsourcing the System i work or moving to a Java-based application infrastructure. Since the first is hard to come by, that leaves the second.

And that leaves the AS/400 on the verge of falling off the map there. Perry said the midrange presence has been “decimated” there in the last few years, estimating that only about 10% of AS/400, iSeries and System i servers still remain.

“New Power Systems may be sold there, but the IBM i operating system seems to be making no headway,” Perry wrote.