The Inovis Blog

Our second post of the day is from Greg Conant, Senior Product Architect III. Greg also went to COMMON and was kind enough to give us his take on the event.

I am glad I was able to attend COMMON’s 2008 Annual Meeting and Exposition in Nashville.  COMMON is a fantastic way to keep in touch with the IBM midrange market.   Considering that IBM keeps changing the name of the midrange hardware platform and its associated operating system, I feel it is important for all of us to keep in touch or we might get left behind.  There were some really interesting things announced at this year’s IBM Town Hall Meeting including a brand new “Power” platform!  The old System i and the old System p are being replaced with a new single “Power” platform.  Additionally the i5/OS is being renamed to “i” for Business.

But is this really a big deal?  The AS/400, iSeries, System i, and “Power” are all basically the same hardware platform, aren’t they?  Isn’t the underlying architecture of these machines the same?   Isn’t this just an old legacy System/38 that just keeps getting repackaged?  After all, what is in a name anyway?  OS/400, i5/OS, “i” for Business, are they not just grownup System/38 CPF?  Is it really all that important?  Don’t a lot of the “experts” say the “i” is a dead platform?  Is the “Power” technology pushing out the “i” in favor of the “p”?  Doesn’t this dead “i” platform keep dying every few years, decade after decade?  And who are these “experts” anyway?

It makes sense to me that IBM made the “Power” announcements at COMMON.  After all, the “i” platform is the most misunderstood machine on the planet.  The community of “i” users that is represented by the COMMON users group are the only people that fully appreciate the system for what it is. Where else in the world would Dr. Frank Soltis receive a standing ovation?

The basic architecture of the “i” was invented in the 70’s and it continues to be refined.  Other manufacturers (including IBM) have attempted to implement some of the key architectural components, but none of them have been successful in catching up with the “i”.  Todays “i” operating system and “Power” hardware are built with the most advanced technology on the planet.

I feel the most awesome thing about this family of systems is that IBM can make significant advancements in technology such as what is contained in this announcement and IBM can keep it completely transparent to the end users like us (don’t you wish other operating system vendors could do the same?).  IBM isn’t just recycling old systems; IBM is inventing significant new technology that we can painlessly take immediate advantage of.   ”i” applications both old and new will seamlessly take full advantage of this latest technology.

This is mainly accomplished by one architectural feature called the “Technology Independent Machine Interface” which allows application programs to take advantage of advances in hardware and software without recompilation.  For example, all applications even ones that were written for the 48-bit System/38 take full advantage of today’s 64-bit processor and operating system without application software changes, not even a recompile!  And this feature allows future implementation of 128-bit processors when they become available. Isn’t that amazing?

Sure, things like MI, the virtual machine and single-level storage concepts and the object-based system with an integrated DB2 database are cool, but does anyone care?  In fact, most people don’t.  IBM makes the “i” so easy to use that changes like this usually go usually go unnoticed except by the small number of people that implement these machines.  And since you don’t need an army of system administrators to keep these machines up and running there is only a small population of us in existence.

As one of the IBM’ers put it during the COMMON announcement, the “i” operating system is the “secret sauce” that makes the machine so successful.  With this new positioning of the platform and a renewed marketing push, the “i” may finally get the industry attention it deserves.

I think there were a lot more significance to the IBM announcements than just the name changes and some new hardware technology.  What do you think of the new Power with “i” for Business?