The event presents an opportunity for reflecting on the success of a unique platform and gives rise to the question of whether it will last another decade--or perhaps longer.
IBM workers in Rochester, Minnesota, and their guests from COMMON will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the AS/400 today, a milestone that begs the question of whether the venerable architecture that so steadfastly outlasted most of IBM's early competitors will be around for another decade or longer.
Trying to describe the essence of the AS/400--or today more appropriately called Power Systems--may be somewhat akin to defining the nature of a human being. Are you your body (the hardware)? Are you your soul (the operating system)? Are you your collective set of behaviors (the software that works on you alone)?
With the functional challenges that have emerged in porting the IBM i OS over to the BladeCenter, it isn't even clear that the AS/400 is the sum of its parts; it appears to take on characteristics beyond those individual components contained within it and become a unique creation altogether. The AS/400 clearly wasn't just the operating system, although that obviously was a core element. Collectively, it has been the result of a synergistic effect in the realm of combining two chemical elements and arriving at a third with unique characteristics--one plus one has now equaled nine.
The reason the computer has endured and the reason for its somewhat mysterious nature goes far beyond its technology and operating system. It goes deep into the teams of intelligent, hardworking people who have contributed their time, their best and brightest ideas, and their long hours of hard work to make it a success. The mystery of the AS/400 and the explanation for its longevity is not its unique architecture, although that has been an enabling component. Its remarkable success is rooted in the community of dedicated people passionate about its development, growth, and continued usefulness in furthering the ambitions of millions of business people and those who depend on them throughout the world.
The 20th anniversary of the announcement marking the introduction of the AS/400, actually this past Saturday, June 21st, is "not only an opportunity to reflect on the technology changes over the years," says Ian Jarman, manager, Power Systems software. "It's also a time to reflect on the community and strength of passion and dedication on their part as well."
Jarman notes that a look down memory lane reveals the enormous impact the AS/400 has had on IBM in the small to midsize business segment, where it has been a "powerhouse," providing new sales revenues and opportunities for follow-on business. But a large part of that success "has been through the strength of the ISV community and the application market that grew up around the AS/400," he says. The other tier in supporting the growth and proliferation of the system, of course, has been the Business Partners and the design of the reseller channel model, which has served the market well for many years.
"The anniversary is not only a celebration of all the technology achievements as much as it is about the achievements of the community and the marketplace itself," says Jarman.
Whether users and the overall marketplace are growing tired of the venerable AS/400 in its later forms and perhaps would like to shed it for something completely new and refreshingly different isn't clear. What is clear is that many businesses are intimately wed to the platform and couldn't easily get out of the union even if they wanted to. IBM, like a good mother-in-law, is always close by, constantly trying to shore up the relationship and smooth over any disputes that could lead to larger problems.
Certainly, there are new things to excite loyal users and newbies about the IBM i platform and to help keep the romance alive. These include:
•· Moving to the faster Power6 processor
•· Release of V6.1 of the IBM i operating system
•· Porting the OS onto a blade in the BladeCenter S
•· Expanded virtualization using PowerVM to seamlessly run IBM i, AIX, and Linux all on the same platform
•· And the most recent announcement that the lightning-fast Power 595 64-way server, which broke the 5 GHz barrier, will be ready and available in September to customers running IBM i OS
In an interview with MC Press Online, Jarman noted somewhat ironically the differences between the first AS/400, a Model B10, announced in June 1988, and the Power 595 in terms of their relative capabilities. Using IBM's performance metric, CPW, the B10 stood at three, but the Power 595 will come in at 300,000--a multiple of 100,000 times more capable than the first machine 20 years ago. What is even more ironic is that the application that ran on the first B10 would still run just fine on the Power 595 with no recompilation necessary due to the underlying AS/400 architecture and IBM's commitment to protect its customers' prior investment in software.
Jarman noted that, while IBM has made a large investment in the platform, so have a lot of ISVs, Business Partners, and customers. IBM for several years has been working with ISVs to modernize their applications, a sore point with customers a few years back who saw some ISVs resting on their laurels despite major upgrades in the hardware platform.
"At this point, the vast majority of our ISVs have made the move to modernize their applications," said Jarman. "They have adapted their investments by adding new interfaces, Web-based capabilities etc., but at the same time, they have been able to retain the core value of their application code."
Jarman notes that the competitors like DEC and VAX, against whom IBM was selling when the AS/400 first came out, are no longer in the market. Today, the company is competing against Dell, Hewlett Packard, and Sun, and Power Systems are doing very well, particularly in the UNIX market with their AIX offerings.
Despite some reports to the contrary, Jarman sees the IBM i platform remaining viable for many years to come for several reasons. One is the unique architecture that has allowed it to come this far while protecting businesses investments in software; two is the huge investment in legacy applications that businesses don't want to abandon; and three is the fact that IBM continues to invest in new technology to maintain and enhance both the hardware and the operating system to keep it current with today's business needs.
He did acknowledge that one of the major developments this year, the introduction of IBM i onto a blade, has yet to catch on in the marketplace, but there are customers now considering it. New IBM investments to allow support for tape and RAID 5 in the BladeCenter S chassis will mean both features will be available within the next year to address expressed user needs. "The vast majority of sales that we have this year will still be in the traditional model [non-blade]," says Jarman. "There's a long way to go in terms of ramp-up and adoption," he concedes but affirms that IBM foresees significant market expansion in blades and reports there is consensus within the company "that we need to be making investments in order to exploit the growth of blades."
With the future of computing seemingly headed toward "the cloud," Jarman believes Power Systems are uniquely suited to play in that virtualized world because of the inherent virtualized architecture of the platform and the introduction of PowerVM, which presently is the fastest-selling software product on the platform.
"I think we're very well-positioned in the area already because at the heart of cloud computing is virtualization," he says. "The architecture of the system is actually a virtual architecture," says Jarman, adding that more than 95 percent of the platform's larger clients are already using logical partitioning and virtualization.
As to the disparity between available RPG programmers and companies' needs for them to modernize and maintain a vast number of legacy systems, Jarman says IBM continues to work on that challenge with its expanding Academic Initiative and sees the impending retirement of IBM i professionals as creating a "tremendous opportunity" for the next generation of IT workers. "Our systems run in many of the best companies," notes Jarman, "and those are the companies you want to work for." Jarman recommends students become familiar with tools that will enable them to program in multiple environments, however, and says that knowing only a single programming language "isn't going to be enough" to meet the challenges of the next decade.
Will the AS/400, or its offspring IBM i operating system, whether it's running on a blade in a virtualized environment or on a standalone box, make it past its third decade in good health? There certainly seem to be enough stakeholders involved to suggest the answer easily could be a dignified mais bien sûr, or, for those who may yet know but one "language"--but of course!
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