There have been plenty of arguments for and against putting System i on a blade server. Proponents say that being able to have their i, p and x86 servers all in one BladeCenter chassis is a big selling point. Detractors worry that I/O performance won’t be the same on a blade, or that System i shops in general don’t really need the small-form factor of the blade.

But as Chris Maxcer points out in his talk with IBM business partner Sirius, interest in the i blade has been high so far, but sales are low. Why? Well, when you get to the end of the post, it seems that maybe it’s just because System i blades are still in their infancy. IBM announced the first i blade at the beginning of April, so we’re only a couple months in.

Because it’s early on, configurations are limited. Users can get IBM i (formerly i5/OS) on the JS12 blade, which has a single dual-core Power chip, or the JS22 blade, which has two dual-core Power chips. Even there, though, there is some confusion on IBM’s own website regarding the JS22. While one Power blade overview site mentions support for IBM i on the JS22, the more detailed server specs page says nothing about IBM i support. In the end it doesn’t matter that much — if JS22 supports IBM i, then it supports it. But there could be some confusion in the meantime from users (or nosy reporters) browsing the site.

Maxcer also quotes Sirius as saying that there essentially needs to be a trifecta for a user to want to buy i blades. One, they have to be an i user. Second, they should probably already be running blades and have a BladeCenter chassis on the ready (with empty slots, of course). And finally, Sirius said the user would also have to have DS4000 or DS8000 external storage server.

One final note on the post: At the end, we find out that Sirius is actually bullish on i blades, with the director of System i and x products at the company saying that “(i)n the future, five-to-ten years, it’s going to be widely adopted.”

A few years ago, Salesforce.com came out with a product called AppExchange that allowed independent software vendors to host their applications on Salesforce.com for customers to use. It’s the software as a service (SaaS) approach that there is a lot of talk — and some think a lot of hype — around.

I mention this because Magic Software, a System i vendor that develops products around helping IT run in sync with business goals. Last week, the company announced that one of its signature products, iBOLT, would be offered on Salesforce.com.

Of course this leads me to wonder about whether there are a lot of System i companies out there that are Salesforce.com customers, and in particular if they use Salesforce.com for SaaS purposes.

I looked around and noticed that J.D. Edwards, one of the biggest System i ISVs, is also part of the site, and that Salesforce.com is definitely pitching the idea of being able to do SaaS of any kind of so-called “legacy” systems through them.

We asked a few of our experts what experience they may have had running SaaS products on i, and a few responded that they didn’t have experience. So generally speaking, we can safely assume that this is still pretty new. However, Jim Mason of ebt-now shared that he has worked with customers on Salesforce.com using standard ETL tools Informatica and Data Stage which essentially do the same thing that iBolt does.

When asked about any concerns about user friendliness and security when using a product like iBolt, Mason responded,

“If you are trying to do the replication real-time, experience has shown high variances in actual performance often over the Web and proprietary networks. Properly done, security shouldn’t be an issue. Like many good ETL tools, iBolt appears to minimize programming by using visual editors to create the data maps between the data source and the data target.”

He also elaborated that the advantage and attractiveness of a product such as iBolt includes the decreased technical skill requirements to operate the program compared to locally-installed programs. However, he also noted that “debugging connection or performance problems to an SaaS application can be challenging, even for the vendors.”

With the growth in popularity of cloud computing, Mason thinks that SaaS products have a growing role to play. In fact, he’s banking on it. His company is rolling out SaaS web solutions for small businesses in the coming year that will focus on online Web collaboration without programming, simple Web stores with simple data transfers for item catalog and sales data, online web meetings and collaboration tools, and online Web databases and applications that can be synchronized with local databases using export/import in batch mode.

Magic has some customer testimonials, but I’m curious if there’s anyone else out there who is using Salesforce.com, and in what capacity. And if not, why not.

Associate Editor Leah Rosin contributed much of this report.

So far the feedback on renaming the operating system from i5/OS to i or IBM i has overall been mixed, although there are some detractors who have some strong opinions. This one comes directly from an IT employee from an Arizona-based general contracting company:

Changing the name of the operating system to just “i” is just another idiotic idea from IBM, probably initiated by the same stupid “marketing geniuses” that dreamt up the latest super dumb campaign starring brainless “Gil” and his young clueless “geek” buddy, whose name (thankfully) escapes me.

IBM could have at least dropped the “5″ and made it i/OS or or i-OS or OS/i or OSi or something beyond just the single letter “i.”

Are they going to now change z/OS to z??

Fictitious scenario, similar to Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First” :

1. What operating system do you run ? i.
2. I what ? Just i.
3. Just you ? No, not me - i.
4. (repeat 2 and 3 above, ad infinitum)

Who would be stupid enough to choose a non-capitalized first-person pronoun to represent absolutely anything (beyond its normal English meaning/usage) ?

Lastly, the really nice thing (not), is that until IBM either reverses this name change or until the next (inevitable) name change, everyone in the AS/400 (yes, I said it) community gets to perpetually respond to their Microsoft Outlook client spell-check feature (F7) to “Ignore” every instance of i.

Even enclosing the i inside quotation marks still “throws” a “Not in Dictionary:” error. The only viable alternative is to tell spell-checker to “Add” “i” to its dictionary, after which the spell-checker forever loses its ability to find a bona-fide yet accidental neglect to capitalize a legitimate reference to one’s self, via the pronoun I. Between the above two choices, I will begrudgingly be forced to continually inform spell-checker to “Ignore” every occurrence of an i (to refer to the OS).

Even though no other words — other than “i” — in this e-mail are misspelled, it still took me about 15 seconds to respond “Ignore” to all of the occurrences of i in this e-mail. Hopefully, IBM’s bone-head decision to call the operating system “i”, will cause it to spend many thousands of dollars when its own employees are forced to do the same.

Most disheartening is that (to my knowledge) the user-community wasn’t even queried for suggestions as to whether to change the name or, given a name change, what to call it. They could have even made a contest out of it, and given away a “blade” (or would that be an i-blade?).

Don’t take this personally, because I know it’s not your doing; however please feel free to forward it to anyone in IBM who 1) would care; and 2) would actually be instrumental in rectifying this mistake (like that could/will happen).

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Last year IBM and Nortel announced that it would collaborate on a Voice over IP product targeted for smaller customers — 1,000 users maximum. This would compete with 3Com’s IP telephony product on the i somewhat, although the only overlapping would be at the high-end of Nortel’s product and the low-end of 3Com’s.

Needless to say, about nine months after the initial announcement, Nortel will ship software for the IP telephony product starting Friday.

The software, called the Nortel Software Communication System (SCS) 500, runs on a Linux partition on the System i. The SCS500 provides its own Linux distribution, but it also requires that users have i5/OS V5R4 or IBM i 6.1 (i5/OS V6R1) as well. Customers can use the computer’s microphone and speakers, a headset plugged into the computer, one of four hard preconfigured hard phones provided by Nortel, or their own hard phones that have been configured to work in the IP telephony system. The system is connected to voicemail, email, instant messaging, and other computer programs, which is why IBM and Nortel are fond of calling it “unified communications.”

According to IT Jungle, licenses for the SCS500 will start at $220 each with maintenance costing $34 per user per year.

Along with i5/OS V6R1 is the DB2 that comes with it, and as there are enhancements in V6R1, so there are for DB2, IBM’s relational database management system. Let’s go over some of the details of those enhancements.

Usability

Many features have been added to System i Navigator, the user interface to System i servers, that enhance DB2 usability.

• DB2 On Demand Performance Center, which helps tune SQL performance on your System i, now includes customized reports that can be exported to more formats such as spreadsheets so users can more easily review and share SQL performance data.
• The DB2 Health Center, which reports on database performance and availability, now allows users to track their database environments against system limits.
• Fast Summary Compare, which allows users to look at a summary of captured data to determine which detailed data should be captured in the future.

Extended support for industry and DB2 standards

SQL Call Level Interface (CLI) is often the interface used when porting application data to DB2 on i5/OS. Now that interface can support wide-character APIs to increase the portability of certain SQL CLI applications.

The DB2 for i5/OS .NET provider now provides tighter integration with Microsoft Visual Studio development environment by adding support for Visual Studio database interfaces and Server Explorer, a server management console for Visual Studio.

The new DB2 provides enhancements to SQL Query Engine (SQE), a technology that IBM says improves queries for database access and is easier to use than the existing Classic Query Engine (CQE).

Application Development

IBM wanted the enhanced DB2 for i5/OS V6R1 to make it easier to use SQL within RPG applications. Included in those improvements are better pre-compilers, the ability to create a SQL statement “shell” that can be automatically copied into an application’s source code, and making coding SQL statements into RPG apps easier using WebSphere and Rational development tools.

DB2 Development Center has been renamed to DB2 Data Studio and offers an area to develop and deploy stored Java or SQL procedures, as well as wizards to help developers create web services based on DB2 data.

Support for data warehouse and BI applications

DB2 Web Query provides the ability to query and build reports from DB2 through browser-based interfaces. With V6R1, it now has licensing changes so users have more options and can save money.

The SQL Syntax support for DB2 now allows a user to group more kinds of data into a single query to reduce the amount of coding necessary for application developers.

IBM has published a Redbook paper on its Express Runtime Web Environments for i5/OS, a nifty and free way to help System i users to install and configure a Web environment for their System i applications.

The product is an embedded part of i5/OS and has been since V5R4. In addition, users can also download it from IBM’s site. The 20-page paper gives an overview of the product in addition to detailing line-by-line commands on how to get it up and running.

What the product does is install a bunch of programs — such as V5R4 iSeries Access for Web and WebSphere Application Server Express — and configures them to get users started. It also includes a few sample Web applications to play around with, all of which modernize flght400, a common sample RPG application that does flight reservations.

Bytware, the System i security software company that brought you the i5virus game, has another ad campaign in the works that will include some interactive Flash games.

MoshiMoshi (”moshi moshi” is a traditional telephone greeting in Japan) will be launched at the Common conference in Nashville later this month, and will follow the trials and tribulations of the various characters in a fictional corporation. As the different characters come across various dilemmas involving IT security, users playing the game can decide what the characters will do. Some of the characters have humorous names — the accountant’s last name is “Sudoku,” for example, while the boss’s last name is “Ono.” As people play the game, their decisions for what the characters should do will affect how the game continues and ends.

The games will take place in eight episodes over eight weeks — one a week — with prizes awarded each week to users who play the game. Some potential prizes will include educational literature, free software licenses, and free security consulting.

Lee Kroon, a well-known columnist and consultant on System i enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and especially J.D. Edwards, posted a blog earlier this week on The J.D. Edwards Advisor about how i5/OS V6R1 can benefit JDE customers.

The new operating system, which IBM officially unveiled last week, will be available in March. Kroon summarizes four major reasons why V6R1 is good for JDE users: better Java performance, virtual i5/OS partitions, support for blade servers, and improved storage area network (SAN) performance.

Kroon wrote that JDE EnterpriseOne customers accustomed to running the Java Application Server on a separate platform may now be able to reconsider, adding that “IBM has told us that Java performance under V6R1 will only be a few percentage points less than that of AIX running on comparable System p models.”

With virtual i5/OS partitions, Kroon said it will be much easier for JDE customers to set up virtual partitions to allow for testing and development. V6R1 allows users to create virtual partitions that borrow resources from other partitions, a feature that wasn’t previously available.

Kroon also said that support for blade servers could help reduce hardware costs for JDE users.

System i5 security vendor Bytware Inc. has wrapped up its i5 online game, where contestants navigated YouTube videos and searching for clues on different Web sites to solve a fictional System i security mystery, all the while learning about PHP and i5/OS security.

The grand prize winner, who gets a Nintendo Wii, was Anna Musella-Chiasson, a senior iSeries analyst with Canadian company CGI. There were also four winners of $100 gift certificates at Apple: Kristina Alcorn, a senior systems engineer at the Automotive Retail Group in Troy, Mich,; Suzanne Dahms, the executive VP at Union Bank in Lake Odessa, Mich.; John Pfitzner, a programmer at EFCO Corp. in Monett, Mo.; and Patrick Sczypiorski, an applications systems manager at Velvac in New Berlin, Wis.

The game will remain online, although Bytware didn’t say for how long.

The IT Jungle has a bunch of user feedback regarding the System i, where it’s going, and where it should be going. This comes in the midst of a small revenue increase for the platform announced by IBM last week. Still, the platform isn’t nearly out of the weeds yet, and to be able to survive, IBM needs to listen to its customer base.

The suggestions range from the usual complaint about the name of the platform — one user astutely says: “Google ‘i’ and you will see my point” — to another wishing that IBM would make RPG a “true Web Programming Language,” to another sadly wishing that IBM would see the i5/OS to another company such as Oracle or Zend “that has the necessary get up and go to make the improvement to the OS that it needs to compete.”