On April 10, IBM made some very significant System i announcements that should finally put to rest the years of torment we have had from our misinformed Windows and Unix brethren about System i being too expensive and too slow. The major announcements revolved around what IBM is calling the small-to-medium sized business (SMB) systems, namely the introduction of the 515 and 525 Express models. These machines are still, to all intents and purposes, POWER5+ model 520s but with some important performance and marketing amendments.

For a number of years now, IBM has been making processors that were too fast for it to market at a price attractive to low and medium sized i5/OS users. Because of the speed of the processors IBM has 'slugged' the processors to slow them down. A model 520 with a single POWER5+ processor has the ability to provide you with 3,800 CPWs when fully configured. Let's look at the CPW ratings of the POWER5+ processor in a 520:

600    CPW  1,200 CPW
2,800 CPW  3,800 CPW

So, if you are running a 1200 CPW 520 and wish to upgrade to 2,800 or 3,800 CPWs you simply pay IBM the relevant upgrade charge. IBM will then send you a code that is entered in to the system and, hey presto!, you have the additional CPW power with no hardware changes required. It is just a case of reducing the amount of slugging on the processor. What has really irritated me about this over the last few years is that this is not the case for System p boxes; they have had the full power of the processor available even on the smallest models. The great news is that both the 515 and 525 have had the slugger removed; this means that CPU-intensive tasks will be able to utilise 100% of the processor's capability, unlike the previous slugged processors. 

Before we all get carried away, we need to understand that a system's CPW rating is based upon a fully configured system configuration, ie maximum disk arms and maximum memory. The model 515 is limited in the amount of memory and disks that can be configured, so for I/O-intensive applications IBM have rated the machine at 800 CPW. For compute-intensive applications the same machine is rated at 3,800 CPW. This is no different to a Windows or Unix system. If you have a 2 GHz Dual Core Intel processor and you run an I/O-intensive task will it make use of the processing power available? Probably not. The model 525, however, can be configured without any restrictions up to the maximums supported by IBM.

It can't be that cheap!

Up to now, the higher the CPW rating the more you paid for the system. The 515 and 525 have, in effect, the same CPW rating, but what about the price? The model 515 starts at just over £5,100, but what do you get for this?

* System i model 515 with 1.9 GHz POWER5+ processor + 36 MB L3 cache
* 1 GB memory
* 2 x 70 GB disks
* integrated disk controller with mirroring capability
* 2 x integrated 10/100/1000 MHz Ethernet ports
* integrated DVD ROM
* integrated 8mm tape drive
* internal modem and WAN adapter
* three months SWMA
* P05 software group
* 9-to-5 next business day HW maintenance
* i5/OS V5R4 five-user licence

What's a user licence?

You will see that the last item on the list above is for a five-user licence for i5/OS. This is a big change for us and applies only to 515 and 525 models. No more worrying about Standard Edition boxes with zero interactive and Enterprise Edition with full processor interactive capabilities -- the new boxes have all the processor available for both interactive and non-interactive processing. Hallelujah.

Let's look more closely at what this is and what it gives you. i5/OS is changed to user-based pricing rather than processor-based for the 515 and 525 systems. The 520, 550 and above all remain the same, processor-based pricing. An i5/OS user licence allows a person in your organisation to access and use i5/OS, System i5 Access (iSeries Access) including iSeries Access for Web. The minimum number of user licences for the model 515 is five users whereas the minimum for a 525 is 30 users.

IBM defines a person as ‘someone in your enterprise who accesses i5/OS. This could be by user profile, LDAP, kerberos or fingerprint identification'. Basically, if you have 25 people who need to access i5/OS at some point you will need a user licence for each of those users. The user may be an auditor who only uses the system for a couple of hours once a year but they still need a user licence. If I have a two i5/OS LPARs on my system and I log on to one as ROBINSG and the other as GLENNR this only requires one user licence because the user licence is valid for the physical machine not just the individual i5/OS LPARs. The model 515 can support up to 40 users while the 525 has the capability of having between 30 and unlimited users licences.

This may seem a strange thing to do with i5/OS but this is how Windows servers are licensed. There is a misconception that Windows is cheap to buy but it depends on the products installed, number of CALs required and number of processors. Windows licensing can be complex and expensive.

Additional user licences can be purchased from IBM in packs of five for the 515 and packs of 10 for the 525 and the costs are every reasonable. All other IBM products, eg Query, are charged at the current software group price; P05 for the 515s and P10 for the 525s. This may all seem a little strange but consider a model 515 running with spool and print transformation software as a print server. Would this need any more than the standard five  user licences? Not if all you did was sign on to do administrative tasks. If you have other people accessing i5/OS from outside of your organisation such as customers logging on to the system from a web page with an ID, you may need to purchase i5/OS external access.

The 515, in particular, is aimed fair and square at competing with the Wintel market, especially for small businesses. The pricing is right, the hardware is right and the applications are there.

As you can see, the 515 has some limitations but this has been done to make it exceptionally price-competitive with Windows and Unix systems. For those of us who are long in the tooth System i, iSeries, AS/400 people, the 515 in particular puts us right into the Windows market place with a great offering. We have to accept the fact that in this end of the market, servers are sold with a minimum specification and then other bits added on. We need to understand what customers’ expectations are in the small business environment and get comfortable working in this manner.

i5/OS Application Server

Consider this. You are running your legacy i5/OS application on your System i with a single processor quite happily. Then you decide you want to create another i5/OS LPAR which will run WebSphere, PHP or Domino. This additional workload will require you to enable a second processor so IBM charge you a small fee to enable the processor and then a massive fee to enable i5/OS to run on said second processor. On a System i 550 the cost of running i5/OS on this additional processor was around £32,000. This is all before you have purchased additional hardware.

In many instances these costs put customers off and they moved these workloads on to Windows or Unix platforms. With the latest announcement, IBM has introduced i5/OS Application Server whereby you would purchase i5/OS for the second processor at a much reduced price. The main feature of i5/OS Application Server is that the DB2 database is unavailable which makes sense if you are using the i5/OS LPAR to run WebSphere, PHP or Domino, for example. The i5/OS Application Server LPAR can access DB2 on another system or LPAR.
In my example, your system would have two processors enabled and an LPAR assigned to each processor. One LPAR would be running i5/OS and the other i5/OS Application Server.

High-end systems

The top end System i 595 has been extended so that a 64-way version is now available, from the previous top end that had a mere 32 processors. This takes the rating of the top end 64-way System i to 216,000 CPWs and this model uses the 2.3GHz POWER5+ processors. Any customers wishing to order one of these should contact me ASAP as I would be delighted to take the order!

Disks

The 70GB and 140GB disk units have had a massive price drop so that the costs of these now match the prices on System p for the same disks. A 70GB, 15K RPM SCSI disk now costs around £700. This price is across the range, not just for the 515 and 525 models.

There will be many questions about these new systems and features and some confusion too, I imagine, as they represent a major shift for the System i and i5/OS. How good is this announcement? In my opinion this is potentially the most important announcement since we moved from 48-bit to 64-bit processors, and that was a decade ago. I can't remember the last time I saw so much information on the web and in other articles about System i, iSeries or AS/400, most of it very positive.

There should be very few situations now where cost of System i can be used as a reason not to purchase a new System i or upgrade/replace an existing iSeries or AS/400. With this announcement we can definitely say that the legacy of the twentieth century's AS/400 has, at last, been laid to rest.

Glenn Robinson is the managing director of Quattro Consulting. You can ask him about this or any other of his Tech Tips at glennrobinson@quattroconsulting.co.uk