This year, as many of you know, is the 20th anniversary of the introduction of AS/400. This weekend IBM held a big celebration at its campus up in Rochester, Minn. in celebration of the anniversary. But 20 years ago, not everyone was celebrating.

When System/36 and System/38 merged to become the AS/400 back in 1988, the higher-end customers were pleased, but not all the smaller ones were. This according to Frank Soltis, the chief scientist of System i who has been working on the AS/400 platform since it still had the codename of “Silverlake.” Soltis spoke during a Webcast last week hosted by Tango/04, a System i server monitoring software company.

“System/36 folks absolutely refused to buy AS/400 for many years,” Soltis said.

Twenty years later, System i and p have merged to become Power Systems, and similar consternation exists among users. The high-end ones tend to like the merger, Soltis said, while the smaller customers are worried that they’re losing their business computing platform.

So will all the System i users become Power System converts? Perhaps not, but predictions of the platform’s demise may be premature.

It is striking to see how far the platform has come in 20 years. Ian Jarman, the System i product manager, said that the first AS/400 machine, the B10, was rated at 3 cpw (commercial processing workload). A new Power6 that runs i5/OS, the 595, is rated at 300,000 cpw.

Soltis said during the Webcast that if someone had asked him 20 years ago what he’d be doing in 20 years, he certainly would not have guessed that he’d still be working on the AS/400. So what about 20 years from now? Jarman said this:

“I’m very confident that we can take our applications forward into any generation of technology to come and we’ve made investments with Power systems. I can’t predict the future but we have positioned it to really move wherever the mainstream moves.”

Other Soltis anniversaries

Soltis is celebrating other work-related anniversaries this year with IBM. This October is the 30th anniversary of System/38, one of the precursors to the AS/400. And then in November, Soltis is celebrating 40 years of working full-time with IBM. His first assignment? To create a replacement for the System/3 minicomputer, which ended up being the System/38, which ended up being the AS/400, iSeries, System i and now Power Systems.

“Even my children point out to me that in all my 40 years at IBM, I’ve only really worked on one product,” he said.

Regrets?

Soltis revealed that when IBM decided to merge System i and p, the opportunity arose to re-rename the operating system from i5/OS back to OS400. Soltis opposed the reversion, agreeing with most at IBM that “going backward was a bad thing.” Still, all the renaming has given Soltis some regrets.

“If there was something I could do, it would be to undo all the renaming,” he said.

The future, according to Frank Soltis

Some things to look for, both from IBM, its customers, and the server market in general, according to Soltis:

• “In the future one of the things we’re looking to do is move toward special purpose processors. As a result, one of the things we have done is worked out the design of the next generation of Power technology called Power7. If you look at Power7, it’s not just Power anymore. It’s Power plus a lot of these special purpose processors.”
• “Back in 2001, we were having negotiations with Microsoft to run Windows on Power…Over the last several years, Microsoft has been busy moving to 64-bit platforms. As a result, very little has happened with running Windows on Power…We certainly don’t see anything in the near future with Windows running on Power.”
• On the System i blade: “A lot of our customers don’t have blades, and personally I don’t see a lot of them moving to a blade environment. Yes, we’re going to support blades where it makes sense, but also support the fully integrated system as we always have.”
• “Personally I believe over the next couple years there will only be two vendors of processing technology (in business computing)…I’m a firm believer that Intel and IBM will be the two main ones or only ones…”

Kind of an old post, but I missed it and so I need to link to it here. It comes from Aaron Bartell and includes the following joke:

The boy Microsoft programmer is smoking and leaving smoke rings into the air.

The girl AS/400 programmer gets irritated with the smoke and says to her lover co-worker: “Can’t you see the warning written on the cigarettes packet, smoking is injurious to health!”

The boy replies back: “Darling, I am a Microsoft programmer. We don’t worry about warnings, we only worry about errors.”

A recent PowerTech Group study of System i shops concludes that many companies are lagging behind when it comes to implementing proper security measures on their systems. Rich Loeber, president of iSeries security product provider Kisco Information Systems Inc., shares his thoughts on the study.

Over the years, IBM has done a good job of selling the public on the idea that the System i is “the most secure processor available today.” However, the company has not done nearly as good of a job explaining how to make the system secure. Doing that takes work, some of which is not necessarily intuitive. Someone needs to be put in charge of the security setup of the system and design an approach to security for the installation. Often, security takes a back seat to other more pressing needs for the company … until a disaster happens.

Another observation I have is that security efforts are very much focused on the network and keeping outsiders out of the system. But studies clearly reveal that nearly as many security breakdowns happen from inside sources as from outside hackers. Too often it is the insider with too much access to the system who compromises sensitive information. With the advent of convenient storage media, some that you can pass off as a fob on a key chain, the inside threat cannot be ignored.

The system is only as secure as the implementation of the security features. I5/OS may be the most secure operating system around, but if it is not used correctly, you might as well have any OS in place. I have customers who’ve purchased our network security product, SafeNet/400 and have had it in place for years without activating it to control access. They’re just logging activity, when the software has the ability to control activity and prevent unauthorized access attempts. When I hear of one of these accounts, I try to chide them into taking the software up to the next level of protection, but I’ve had little success with these attempts.

One of these days, there is going to be a TJ Maxx or Hannaford security breakdown that’s tracked to System i, and all those who’ve been touting the box’s strong security are going to be back-pedaling like mad.

I don’t really know what to do about this except to sing this song over and over again. I write a monthly column on System i security for Search400.com and I regularly raise these basic issues with my readers. I think that may be my small contribution — educating System i users on what they have and how to use it.

This video has been making the rounds a bit, but I still thought it would entertain readers here if you haven’t seen it. Aaron Bartell is a pretty well-known RPG programmer in the System i world. It looks like Bartell had a little too much coffee in his system and was staying up too late.

By the way, he’s rocking out to “Say This Sooner” by a band called “The Almost.” Some sample lyrics: “No one will ever see these things the way I do / No one will try / All my friends say that I’m gone / But I swear / I swear I’m not.” Those are lyrics that can probably explain a lot of System i programmers’ frustrations with higher-ups who want to phase out the platform. Enjoy.

Timothy Prickett Morgan at IT Jungle has a great column reviewing Hewlett-Packard’s release of the BladeSystem c3000, nicknamed “Shorty.” The new HP chassis can hold eight blades, sits 10.5 inches high and draws from a regular 120-volt wall outlet.

Morgan said this is exactly what IBM should be doing with its blades, and it should have done that — and offered i5/OS in the blade format — a long time ago. Morgan argues that HP is making a better pitch than IBM to the small and medium businesses (SMBs) that are looking to fill their small data centers or server closets with compact hardware that doesn’t throw off a lot of heat.

John Ghrist at the System i Network looks at why there aren’t more biometrics vendors on the System i.

Ghrist asked one of the few System i biometrics vendors out there, Valid Technologies, about it:

I put that question to Greg Faust, Valid Technologies’ CEO. “There aren’t more biometrics vendors in the entire enterprise market space, let alone the System i market, because companies at the enterprise level are slow to adopt new technologies,” he opined.

Ghrist added that biometrics should catch on with System i users because of its ease of use: No longer would there be passwords upon passwords to remember. Simply stick your finger down, have it read your unique print, and be on your happy, System i way. I have another theory why biometrics isn’t taking off on the System i or other enterprise platforms such as the mainframe or Unix boxes. Security on those servers is much better compared to x86 distributed servers, and so right now there is no need for biometric enhancements.

Bruce Guetzkow has a column in IT Jungle saying that IBM’s move to take Screen Designer and Application Design out of WebSphere Development Studio Client 7.0 standard edition and put it into the advanced version (which costs $4,000 per seat) is akin to turning its back on the System i community.

Guetzkow says he refuses to install version 7.0 of WSDc until this is changed. IBM, meanwhile, has hinted that it would offer components of WSDc for separate prices, but developers are not happy with this change. It will be interesting to see if they’re willing to back down on this topic, since the developer community has expressed its disgust.

The PowerTech Group has released another study looking at System i security, and has found yet again that it’s the people administering the systems that tend to cause security leaks, and not weaknesses in the hardware itself.

According to the story, findings from the study include:

• 76 percent of systems don’t control or audit changes to data made through PC access applications such as MS Excel and MS Access, creating uncontrolled network access.
• 10 percent of all users have privileged access (root-level access) authority.
• Confidential reports can be viewed by 20 percent of all users.
• Half of all systems have more than 20 users with default passwords (Password = User name) that can be easily determined by any attacker.

The findings are similar to the study PowerTech did last year.

Frank Soltis, the chief scientist of System i, said that a new entry-level System i will be hitting the streets soon and is aimed to compete with smaller Windows and Linux servers. Soltis was a keynote speaker at a recent user group meeting.

He also said that IBM this year will introduce a new System i5 595 as well as a System i box with the new Power 6 processor technology.

Next week, I’m heading to an IBM event announcement in Cambridge, Mass. There is plenty of mention of SMBs and ISVs in the invitation, so it’s a good bet this could be System i-related. Stay tuned.

IBM and 3Com really want you to start up a VoIP system, or as they call it, IP telephony, on the System i.

The two announced the initial partnership to get VoIP on System i last October. Now the System i Network is reporting that they’re trying to pack more into the IP telephony package. I’m curious as to whether any of you out there have considered this or even taken the plunge and implemented it. Do you think VoIP on System i is a good thing, and are you thinking about doing it?