It didn’t take long for Big Blue to start retooling its iSeries line, did it?
A week and a half after Armonk, N.Y.’s IBM
announced that Lotus division general manager Al Zollar was
taking charge of the server line, IBM Monday unveiled the transformation of
its iSeries family, including new products, geared for on-demand e-business.
The systems vendor unveiled four new servers, including the eServer iSeries
870 and 825 models, which join the king-of-the-hill i890 at the high-end of
the family. All three models are capable of running OS/400, Windows, Linux
and Unix. On the small to medium enterprises front, the firm also issued a
the iSeries 810 and 800 as new low-end machines. The iSeries 800 is a new
single processor model, starting at $9,995. The new boxes will be powered by
IBM’s vaunted POWER4 processors.
According to iSeries Product Manager Ian Jarman, the major point of
attraction in the transformed server line, which looks to help customers
save money and time by allowing them to scale if they need it, is the new
temporary capacity-on-demand (CoD) upgrade feature for the high-end models
(i870, i825, i890).
While many IBM systems feature permanent capacity-on-demand features, Jarman
said the new “on/off” style of CoD allows customers to turn on processors
when they need them, and turn them off when they don’t. As opposed to
hardware sitting around, and going to waste, customers pay only for what
they use. Customers can choose between the new temporary or standby
permanent CoD.
While the smaller i800 and i810 servers don’t feature capacity on demand,
they do have logical partitioning (LPAR), which is the division of a
computer’s guts into multiple resources so that each set can be operated
independently with its own operating system and applications. With this,
Jarman said, Linux and Windows coexist on the server.
No less important in the revamped line is the integration of IBM’s WebSphere
Application Server Express on all iSeries models. The company hopes to
empower small and medium enterprises to build and manage Web sites is now
supported on all iSeries models.
It’s also a major area where Zollar’s software expertise from the Lotus
division will come into play, Jarman said.
Maria DeGiglio, Principal Analyst for the Robert Frances Group, lauded IBM’s
strategy, which she said is an aggressively-priced play in a time when the
economic climate demands different pricing structures to accommodate
cash-strapped IT departments who need the facility to operate, but can’t
afford to go all out.
“Capacity-on-demand, which existed on the mainframe for a while, is an
attractive feature,” DeGiglio told internetnews.com. “But the iSeries
is an excellent starting place because of the huge range of customers it
caters to — from small-medium enterprise to the customers that boast into
$2 or $3 billion a year in revenue. The temporary upgrade on demand is a
huge boon to end-user customers and services provider.”
DeGiglio also said the fact that IBM’s server lines are not “independent
silos of technology” goes along way in helping IBM make sure their machines
evolve to meet customer demand. As for the software/hardware integration
aspects, the “fact that they are offering WebSphere Express, Tivoli, and
other products helps clients so they don’t have to go buy piece parts in
another way of fulfilling their promise” for on-demand computing.
With the iSeries line metamorphosis comes the burden of pricing changes. For
that IBM introduced simplified packaging and software pricing options. The
standard edition supports e-business applications and includes the
capability to run multiple operating systems, Capacity Upgrade on Demand and
dynamic logical partitioning. The enterprise edition supports all of those
and DB2, WebSphere, Lotus and Tivoli middleware, as well as training and
services. This format also offers free processor activation for Linux on the
iSeries 870 and iSeries 890, and an integrated IBM eServer xSeries for
Windows integration.
The new IBM eServer iSeries models are slated to roll out Feb. 21.
