AS/400 keeps reinventing itself

I got this in my mailbox from another list I din['t even know I
was on.
It's not tech, but it is a morale booster.

AS/400 keeps reinventing itself
___________________________________

The tried and true AS/400 offers versatility, a solid
performance
reputation -- and lower pricing.

By Johanna Ambrosio


Like Madonna, the AS/400 keeps reinventing itself. Around as a
platform for over 20 years, it was first known as the System/38,
then
as the AS/400 and most recently is being called the iSeries. IBM
relaunched the computer family in October 2000 in a bid to build
the
reputation of the servers as Internet machines of various
stripes.

According to a January 2001 report by Summit Strategies, some
700,000
of the servers have been shipped. IBM claims that the iSeries is
the
only server in the industry to allow customers to run four
different
operating systems simultaneously: OS/400 (the native operating
system
of the AS/400); Unix; Windows NT or Windows 2000; and Linux. IBM
also
says the product line scales from a single processor to a 24-way
processor.

The machine's versatility and reputation for near-constant
uptime
make it a great choice for anyone who wants to run a small or
midsize
business and not worry about the details of how or why the
platform
works. So says Rich Partridge, vice president of enterprise
servers
at independent analyst firm D.H. Brown Associates Inc. in Port
Chester, NY., who also notes that "only IBM" is using the
iSeries'
new moniker. Most everyone else is still calling it the AS/400.

Partridge explained more about the machine's key applications in
the
corporate world in an inteview with TechTarget.

Q: Why are people buying them?
A: The AS/400 has a very loyal following. This customer base
doesn't
usually worry about speeds and feeds, what MHz the chip is or
what
the machine's cache is. Those attributes are not important,
because
this customer base is typically not about pushing the
state-of-the-art. They want an application tailored to a
particular
environment -- manufacturing, medical office, and so on.
Typically, a
value-added reseller will customize and build the machine with
the
correct hardware and software for the application. The customer
drops
it in and runs it. These customers don't want to develop their
own
significant IT expertise in-house, and they don't want the
inconvenience of melding together incompatible packages.

Q: What are the drawbacks to the AS/400?
A: In the past, one drawback had been a higher cost relative to
other
computing platforms. The AS/400 wasn't a commodity, and it
wasn't
something that you could look for in the back of the computer
trade
publications and beat someone down for the best price. It wasn't
like
the Windows/Intel world, where you can mix-and-match one of
these and
one of those.

Q: You said this used to be a drawback. What's happened?
A: Some of this has changed. IBM has merged the underlying
AS/400
hardware with its PowerRisc [Unix-based] series of machines, so
now
it's the same underlying hardware for both families. IBM didn't
want
to expend a lot of dollars on a unique chipset and separate
development, so this has been happening over the past two years.
That
said, the AS/400's operating system does have different features
and
protection modes from the PowerRisc family. And just because the
PowerRisc has the newest chip powering it, that doesn't mean the
same
chip will be released for the AS/400 at the same time. The two
products have separate release cycles, so the same things aren't
available for both at the same time.

Q: And that means...?
A: You can't go out and find a gray-market PowerRisc box and
then run
OS/400 on top of that. First, it may not work. Second, you
wouldn't
be able to have the hardware and software certified and
supported by
IBM or pretty much any third party.

Q: So, is the price of the AS/400 falling?
A: Yes, it's now more competitively priced. The customer base is
still more interested in the specific applications running on
the
machine than they are a particular price/performance metric. But
IBM
recognized that they might have lost some business to people
that
were concerned with pricing and that were doing some comparison
shopping. So IBM addressed that by taking some costs out of the
underlying hardware. There's not a significant price
differential --
the AS/400 still requires more handholding and more
customization to
make sure the customer understands how it all goes together.
This
could still make it more expensive than if a customer assembled
an
application on his own, on an Intel/Windows platform.

About the author: Ambrosio is a freelance writer in Marlborough,
Mass. Reach her at mailto:jambrosio@mediaone.net.