V4R5 -- Should you go or should you stay? -- MIDRANGE-L

Guys,

I just went through the article below and find it detailed but I'm not sure if this is all to be considered for a V4R5M0 upgrade.

I think that Roger should have consider, for one, the fact that IBM SUPPORT FOR OS400 is becoming shorter and shorter everytime I look at their newsletter for OS. So I say OS400 support deadline should have been a KEY to any OS400 upgrade. Are there any other reason to consider this upgrade or whay do you guys think.

Oludare

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By Roger Pence

This is an excerpt from "A year 2000 mid-year heads up for
AS/400 shops," which originally appeared in the July 17,
2000, issue of Roger Pence's AS/400 Letter on Windows,
Workgroups and the Web. It is provided courtesy of The 400
Group (http://www.the400group.com).

Most of the improvements in V4R5 are predictable,
incremental enhancements. Very few changes were made to
core OS/400 facilities. Generally, I'd recommend if yours
is a typical bread-and-butter AS/400 shop, you bypass the
V4R5 upgrade. Here are five specific reasons to consider a
V4R5 upgrade:

1. Enhanced Integrated NetFinity Server. The new PC server
card now supports up to 4GB of memory, and storage per
drive has been increased from 8GB to a whopping 64GB. If
your shop uses NT on the PC server card, its V4R5
enhancements may be enough to upgrade to V4R5.

Gotcha: The new Integrated NetFinity hardware no longer
supports sharing a LAN card between the AS/400 and Windows
servers. If your shop is doing this today, budget now for a
second LAN (and the time for reconfiguration). Even if you
don't upgrade to V4R5, you'll ultimately upgrade and you'll
need that additional LAN card.

2. WebSphere Application Studio/Java. There were many
tweaks to both WebSphere Application Studio and Java. Java
performance was enhanced (again), and the AS/400 Toolbox
for Java was substantially enhanced. From here on out, if
your shop is invested in Java and/or WebSphere Application
Server, you must plan on installing every OS/400 upgrade
that comes down the pike.

3. LPAR and PASE. Both LPAR and PASE got a handful of
enhancements in V4R5. Like Java, if you're using LPAR
and/or PASE, you also need to commit now to installing
every OS/400 upgrade that comes along.

4. Better network printing. If your shop is knocking its
head against the wall with TCP/IP networking printing
problems, you should investigate V4R5's new SNMP (Simple
Network Management Protocol) Print Driver Support. IBM
claims that this new driver allows more printers to be
accessed from an AS/400 with the same capabilities seen
with direct-attached printers.

5. Single-step upgrade from CISC to RISC. V4R5 is the last
OS/400 release to offer a single-step CISC-RISC upgrade.
After V4R5, you're in for lots of grungy, manual work to
get from CISC to RISC.

CA/400-OpsNav enhancements don't provide enough features to
alone merit a V4R5 upgrade. While OpsNav picked up a few
enhancements (DASD management, working with AS/400 database
and Integrated NetFinity Server administration), none are
reasons to run to V4R5. As for CA/400, the most notable
enhancement the announcement letter discusses (also the
first one the announcement letter discusses) is the ability
to specify dynamic workstation IDs (e.g., you can now cause
device IDs to be the first 8 characters of the user ID,
plus a letter or number). However, don't be snookered. This
function is available in V4R4's CA/400 Express client using
Service Pack SF60796.