System iNetwork

April 27, 2009

A Few Nuggets Turn Up for IBM i at COMMON in Reno

I don't think anyone was expecting a booming gold rush at COMMON this year in Reno, and COMMON President Randy Dufault has been quick to thank attendees for coming in a year where time is precious and travel budgets have been slashed. Still, while attendance is certainly down--no official numbers are in--the mood seems upbeat. More importantly, there's a shift going on, and it's hard to say yet how it will shake out: the banner over the stage in the Opening Session noted that COMMON is "The Power Systems User Group."

Dufault, of course, kicked off the annual meeting of its members with the usual business of updating its members on the user group's latest efforts. IBM's Ross Mauri, general manager of IBM Power Systems, was scheduled to speak at the opening session, but he was caught up in Chicago due to weather issues that grounded a number of flights. Jeff Howard, IBM's marketing manager of Power Systems, took his place, revealing a few interesting nuggets.

"In the fourth quarter of 2008, we shipped more high-end IBM i editions than we have ever shipped," he said. And in the first quarter of 2009, 96 percent of the IBM i-focused boxes that IBM shipped out were the converged Power Systems units.

Howard also happily showed one of IBM's favorite graphs, which plots the market server revenue share of HP, Sun, and IBM in the Unix space. Since 2001 or so, HP and Sun's lines led the market, with IBM trailing, but around 2004, the lines intersected and IBM's AIX sales rose over both HP and Sun's lines, which dropped, with IBM's line rising steeply and widening the gap into 2009. While COMMON is certainly embracing Power Systems and AIX, with some AIX users in attendance, at least one presumably i-focused attendee seemed to be taking a nap.

IBM i 6.1 and AIX 6 Are Market-Ready

Howard also noted that IBM i 6.1 has been getting excellent vendor support--600 ISVs now have 1700 applications ready to run on IBM i 6.1. And as for AIX 6, 900 ISVs have 2,900 applications ready to run.

Howard also highlighted PHP on IBM i, inviting Zend CEO Andi Gutmans to join him on stage for a quick Q&A. They noted the usual popularity metrics of 20 million web sites running PHP, with 6 million developers coding in PHP, but also got into some IBM i land: Since Zend first enabled PHP on IBM i, the company has delivered 14,000 unique downloads to IBM i-focused customers. Nice.

Best yet, Gutman pointed out, PHP is great for RPG programmers because it will let them learn the language with procedural coding techniques, but it remains versatile enough to let programmers ease into object-oriented techniques as they gain skill and confidence.

And, of course, Zend and IBM have worked out a deal where Zend Core now comes pre-loaded (but not installed) on every new IBM i edition to ship out of IBM.

IBM's Working Theme

Moving on to IBM's latest deliveries, IBM's new basic working theme is "The New Power Equation for Dynamic Infrastructure." There's nothing groundbreaking about it, but it does give IBM talking points focused on helping companies be more nimble through reducing costs by offering greener, more virtualized solutions, and the like.

Howard revealed that IBM i-edition POWER blades are doing well--the company has sold several hundred of them so far, which is pretty good when you consider that running IBM i on a BladeCenter requires not only a different storage solution but a new mindset as well.

Howard also gave attendees a sneak peak at IBM's new JS23 blade, which is a 2-socket, 4-core blade that offers a 20 percent performance improvement over previous blades. It's running at 4.2 GHz and uses L3 cache, all of which helps give it twice the price/performance ratio over HP's comparable blades and five times the price/performance of Sun's similar offerings. Basically IBM was saying, "You get a lot of power at a great price."

For even more capability, two JS23 blades will snap together to become a JS43, offering double the sockets and cores. To get the JS43, however, you do have to upgrade your license.

Meanwhile, IBM is also introducing a new Power 550 Express and a new Power 520 Express. The 550 will get a 5.0 GHz processor, while the 520 will ramp up to 4.7 GHz.

Solid State Drives on the Way

To offer even faster response times for critical applications, IBM is also now offering solid state drive (SSD) options that, Howard says, can help companies deliver 1.6 times more transactions running through the faster SSD drives over slower traditional disk drives.

And that faster speed, he said, can reduce the overall number of drives needed by a company to keep up with transactions--in one example, a company could go from using 800 hard drives to 36 SSD drives with 80 traditional hard drives. Even better yet, Howard said IBM i customers are at an advantage for using the SSDs because IBM i is already optimized for using them. Stay tuned for more detail as we learn more about using SSDs with IBM i.

In other new deliverables on the way soon, IBM plans to offer new active memory sharing for PowerVM, an improved Systems Director, additional Linux support, virtual tape support for IBM i and RAID 5, along with new I/O drawers.

DB2 Web Query Selling Well

Howard also noted that IBM's DB2 Web Query was selling well, noting that it was one of IBM i's fastest selling IBM applications ever--the company has already delivered 25,000 licenses.

The next major release of IBM i is slated for 2010, and it will bring DB2 XML support and enhanced encryption, PowerHA asynchronous clustering for internal disk, more virtual I/O, and exploitation of SSDs, among other enhancements not yet detailed by IBM.

Overall, many of these announcements should be made public tomorrow by IBM.

Posted by cmaxcer at April 27, 2009 8:22 AM