In a new IT Jungle article, Timothy Prickett Morgan discusses IBM’s Q4 sales strategy for System i. He offers some compelling arguments and analysis of IBM’s moves during 2007 as well as what the company’s short-term roadmap might mean for System i users. Here are some of the highlights I found interesting:

• “IBM is expected to roll out the Power6 processor across the System i and System p lines in 2008, with the System i perhaps getting a revamp with a 615, 625, and 655 box in the late January to late February timeframe.”
• “IBM is going to stop selling OS/400 V5R3 on January 4, 2008. No matter what, customers with AS/400 and iSeries 270s and 7XX machinery have to at the very least buy V5R3 before then because V5R3 is the final release to be supported on these machines.”
• “Upgrades from iSeries Model 810 and 825 servers to user-priced System i 515 and 525 servers or a 550 Enterprise Edition are being withdrawn on December 1.”
• “Upgrades to System i 5XX machines from iSeries 870 and 890 servers are still going to be available until April 8, 2008, and that is presumably because customers with these classes of machines need more planning time to figure out their upgrade path into the 9406-MMA 570 server that is a natural upgrade path for them.”

Automated operations and business intelligence software company Help/Systems announced last week the addition of Linux support to its server operations event management software Robot/CLIENT. Here is what Robot/CLIENT does:

Robot/CLIENT acts as agent software running on non-System i servers, including Windows and UNIX. It checks server operational status, receives job status information, launches processes, monitors server applications and services, and transfers data. With Linux support, users can integrate their Linux servers into their System i procedures.

By using Robot/CLIENT agent software with Robot/SCHEDULE (the job scheduler and batch management software) as their master scheduler, users can schedule jobs on the server and receive a completion status; monitor server status; transfer files between the System i and the server; and much more. Linux servers managed by Robot/CLIENT run efficiently and reliably, expanding the scope of a System i-based enterprise.

Robot/CLIENT for Linux integrates with the other Robot Automated Operations Solution products, including Robot/ALERT for system event notification; Robot/CONSOLE for message, resource, and log management; Robot/SPACE for disk space management; and Robot/NETWORK for complete network management. Now, the System i automated operations team can control Linux systems, too.

Pretty cool stuff for shops running a variety of platforms that need to have their systems work together. Do you use this or other operations management software? Want to share your product reviews or offer tips to the rest of the 400 community about using Robot/CLIENT or like systems management software? You can always send me an email or leave your comments here.

Timothy Prickett Morgan at IT Jungle has put together a great resource for older AS/400 and iSeries shops that are thinking about upgrading to a System i model. Heck, the resource is great for those who aren’t thinking about upgrading, simply because it’s always good to consider options that you didn’t know you had.

And it’s no surprise that IBM is trying hard to sell new hardware; judging by revenue numbers over the past two years, IBM hasn’t done so well when it comes to System i hardware. At least part of that problem is the hardiness of the platform itself. We’ve all heard stories of System i machines sitting in corners, running for years without a hiccup. While it’s a blessing for the shops where that is the case, it can be a curse for IBM: Its customers are hesitant to fix what they don’t consider broken.

And so IBM has assembled a way to compare AS/400 and iSeries boxes with what it views as the ideal System i hardware upgrade. The site looks at processor performance, hardware and software maintenance, and power costs. To simplify it for you, Morgan put it in this awesome System i comparison table. Check it out. Bookmark it.

As Lukas Beeler waits for some wanted software to be delivered, he decided to write about IBM’s poor delivery times, both on the software and hardware side:

When it comes to delivery times, my experience with IBM has always been abysmal. The local swiss distributors (Avnet, TechData, Also) are usually low on stock, don’t have any System i stock (automatically giving you 2-8 weeks, depending on IBM’s mood). Software orders also take ages, especially additional software on new Systems (we usually buy 5722-IP1 for our customers to generate PDF). These software orders usually take 2+ weeks after the system was shipped.

Does anyone else out there run into this problem with IBM? Let me know about it in the comments section.

System i application developer LANSA announced Wednesday a partnership with IBM distributor Avnet Partner Solutions in order to bring LANSA’s so-called “Lease of Life” legacy modernization hardware, software and consulting bundle to System i users.

The press release describes the result of this partnership as a consortium that sells packaged System i server lines with software and an “ROI calculator” (i.e. Excel spreadsheet), which is designed to help users determine a legacy modernization approach via LANSA’s Rapid Application Modernisation Process (RAMP).

LANSA offers the option to take their “RAMP Challenge,” which is essentially a survey with check boxes which will presumably determine what system to see you. Perhaps System i users save money money through the Lease of Life consortium because LANSA (and Avnet) have developed this self-consult survey, thereby saving on their consulting overhead.

More investigation is needed to determine how useful the Lease of Life consortium really is. If someone has tried it, let me know. My initial impression is to label this effort a repackaged sales pitch.

Thanks to Search400.com reader Aaron for sending us an email about his experience with PHP on System i.

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At my last company (dental insurance) I was brought in to migrate away from a Lotus web server onto a LAMP stack that talked to RPG on System i. It worked (mostly) like a charm with about 20 RPG developers and 3 web programmers. A fair amount of the business logic was done on the RPG side while the PHP front ends took care of capturing/cleansing/display input/output. Although with session based variables available in PHP some of the business logic was just beginning to be moved on to the web side as well. The Zend platform was in the beginning stages of being evaluated when I left.

I’ve since taken those lessons and applied them as an IT Manager at my current job which is also based on System i. Again, it works wonderfully. Here we use it more for reporting than anything else over the intranet but it has given us a flexibility that the company did not have before (example: hooking up lat/long info from the platform application directly to Google Maps via PHP and displaying truck location on demand where previously you had to either login into vendor’s site and give truck # or call an 800 number and have it automatically faxed). I have considered using the Zend platform on the iSeries itself but have yet to determine a great reason to do so when LAMP over to the iSeries seems to deliver everything I need at the moment.

I’ve worked on a fair amount of different platforms over my career and I believe that the marriage of PHP and RPG on the i is one my favorite combo yet (provided I have the developers for them).

The following is a response from one of our readers, John DeCoville, to Mark Fontecchio’s article IBM System i division filing for divorce. Thanks for the insight, John.

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I think that IBM only has it partly right. The perception has been for a long time that IBM allowed its i-Products to lag behind its competitors.

First: WDSc 6.1 and 7.0 do not have a good “Fit and Finish” compared to the expensively developed MS Visual Studio for VB.NET. WDSc takes a long time for initial loads of source members.It is Balky and not integrated.

Second: DB2 has lagged behind Oracle and even MS SQL-2000. MS SQL-2005 is integrated into MS’s Studio. Unlike MS SQL-Server and Oracle, the developer cannot place an index on a view. Indexes not only improve performance in the Oracle and MS world but allow the DB developer to make views available to more traditional developers where they can work with an access they are familiar with.

Using a cursor is a bit of a leap for developers, not yet retired, who have difficulty using proto-types.

Lastly: The i5xx/ AS/400 has now some new features that do not have good “Fit and Finish” nor good integration that the older AS/400 used to have and Microsoft Developers now does have.

Appearances and Perception are 90% of reality and management is not buying.

Please, IBM, work to dispel the impression that WDSc is incomplete! Please integrate DB2 into the whole mix! Get your Client-Access turbo-charged! Please give the i-family a good fit and finish so it doesn’t come off like Colombo’s Dorky 60’s Peugeot!

I also think that IBM has been poorly represented by their Sales Management and Staff who are plainly clueless.

Thanks!

Now get to work!

A recent article from IT Jungle highlights an online analytical processing (OLAP) software suite from InfoManager, a little known but widely used System i software vendor. According to IT Jungle, InfoManager has been re-working its core of business intelligence software that can manage data and metadata across platforms. It also provides multidimensional ways of viewing BI data that transcends the traditional dashboard interface.

InfoManager plans to release WebAdvisor 3.0, a Java re-written Web -based client interface later this summer.

IT Jungle has a cool article about the AS/400 turning 19 years old. There isn’t a whole lot of reminiscence; most of the story is about where the IBM System i might be going, rather than how far it has come. But it does claim that IBM probably didn’t realize when it created the hardware platform in 1988 (which actually derived from the System/38 platform created a decade earlier) that it would last this long.

Furthermore, on the topic of where it’s going, who really knows, right?

And I don’t think IBM has any better skills than you or I to figure out how the System i will do in the future. IBM gets to try technologies and tactics, it gets to be in control of the initial conditions of each System i product cycle. But that is a far cry from being able to predict what more than 200,000 customers worldwide will do or not do.

Good stuff there. Check it out.

Centerfield Technology, Inc. announced the development of the first autonomic tool designed to optimize DB2 for i5/OS. AutoDBA, the name of the new component, provides expert DB2 advice and options to automatically implement that advice. The first release will focus on fully optimizing database indices (DDS logical files and SQL indices); with the objective of making SQL and RPG programs that process large amounts of data much more efficient.