RE: Planning for an iSeries future

We're on a 730/2067/1509 and are facing the same dilemma.  Our box is
fairly saturated right now, but we could live with it for a bit longer.
We are lucky in that our usage of the system continues to grow and
management has responded in the past with upgrades whenever necessary.  

But that was with budgetary planning.  We were planning on riding out
'03 with no system upgrades.  Then the Jan announcements came out.  If
IBM would have announced in November, we could have budgeted for an
upgrade.  Since they waited until January, our 03 budget cycle was
already complete and without upgrade funding.  So if we do an upgrade,
I'm not sure where the money will come from.

Of course, I can't say I wouldn't personally be excited by moving to a
nice 825 Enterprise, but I have to think of the business.  The price of
the upgrade is very annoying and I don't need most of the features in
the Enterprise suite.  Nor do I need CUoD this year (moving from the 730
to the entry 825 is already tons more power).  I also don't like it that
I'll have to go special bid to get credit for some Enterprise feature
that we already purchased (DB/2 SMP, etc.).

I also wonder what this will mean in the future.  IBM has said that to
upgrade beyond the 825, you'll have to activate all of the add'l CPUs
first.  But what if the CPU power of a 3/4/5-way is adequate and you
just want to upgrade to stay with current technology (like what this
announcement is pressuring us to do now)?  An announcement like the
end-of-life for the 7xx upgrades could be a killer for future upgrades
outside the 825 and other newer models.  Imagine in Jan 2005 IBM
announces EOL for 825 upgrades, but your happy with the performance of
the (say) 4 CPUs you've got.  You want to stay with upgradeable
hardware, so you have to upgrade to 50% more CPU than you need to then
upgrade into a new, no doubt even faster, model.

- John

-----Original Message-----
From: Graap, Ken [mailto:keg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Monday, April 21, 2003 12:31 PM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: RE: Planning for an iSeries future


I was wondering .... As we talk about the situation with my AS/400 Model
730/2C6F/2068/1510...

Is there anyone else who is in the same situation I find our company in?
That is, being on a 730 and facing the dilemma of losing the upgrade
path to the 8xx boxes as of October 2003?

Or is our company the only company that has allowed this to happen? 

Did everyone else upgrade to 8xx last year?

Kenneth

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