Insider Weekly
Eye on the market: 7xx
shops have mixed reaction to Model 810
By Sarah Kimmel
Monday, June 9, 2003
IBM announced the latest generation
of iSeries hardware six months ago, giving 7xx customers, who will
lose their upgrade paths in October, a lot to think about.
“A vast majority of the people
who are on 7xx boxes today will move into the new i810 server, or
possibly the i825. We hope to accelerate the process with the May
introduction of the new baby 810 and new 7xx upgrade paths,”
says Ian Jarman, iSeries product manager, IBM, Rochester, MN.
For some of these customers, the
answer was easy — the Model 810 was a perfect fit and came
at the right time (IW 5/19/03). The City of Cuyahoga Falls was already
looking for a new box in order to get their disaster recovery and
availability solution in place.
“We were budgeted to upgrade
our Model 720 to an 820 this year, but when they announced the new
models, we decided to upgrade to the i810 Enterprise Edition. It’s
almost twice as big as our 720 and we dropped a processor point,”
says Gary Bishop, system administrator, City of Cuyahoga Falls,
Cuyahoga Falls, OH.
However, the decision of what to
upgrade to, or whether to upgrade at all, has not been as easy for
other shops as it was for Cuyahoga Falls. Both pricing and timing
have come into play for many 7xx customers, causing some to rethink
upgrading at all.
“The raw cost of the original
Model 810 — just the processor and Enterprise Edition —
is substantially more than the cost of my customers’ Model
7xx boxes. I have one customer that isn’t upgrading at all.
Another is looking at the little 810, which costs about $25,000
less to start off with,” says Brian Kelly, IT consultant,
Kelly Consulting, Scranton, PA.
Kelly’s customer plans to
upgrade to the new i810 before June 20 in order to take advantage
of IBM’s 10% off 7xx-to-810 upgrade offer, allowing them to
buy the additional hardware needed with the i810. “Because
the 810 is so small, they are going to have to use their savings
to purchase the $19,000 expansion tower in order to attach all their
disk, I/O, and communications,” says Kelly.
Enterprise package keeps shops on 7xx
Even with the announcement of the
low-end i810, the new upgrade paths from 7xx hardware into that
model, and the 10% off promotion, some shops are still finding it
hard to make the case to get out of the 7xx line.
“We want to add more computing
capacity. Before the present IBM offerings, I would have made a
straightforward upgrade to the latest model, but the price of the
Enterprise Edition is prohibitive. The baby i810 would soften the
blow, but it is still too much. The way to go seems to be to keep
the present Model 720, upgrade to V5R2, and keep all the interactive
applications on it as long as I can,” says Ranga Deshpande,
IT director, Jules Bordet Institute, Brussels, Belgium.
The shops that decide to remain
on their 7xx box will lose their ability to upgrade on October 8,
2003. Although not officially announced, because V5R2 was the last
supported release for the 6xx hardware, the follow-on release of
OS/400 is expected to be the last supported release on the 7xx hardware.
Too little, too late
Meanwhile, customers that upgraded
just before the new hardware was announced face a whole new set
of frustrations. Imagine buying a first-generation 8xx box and finding
out a month later that you could have bought a newer box with more
power, a better software tier, and unlimited 5250 interactive for
a similar price.
“We upgraded in December
and a month later IBM came out with the same box for about the same
list price but with a lower processor tier and twice the amount
of interactive. If I had known, I would have convinced the company
to wait another month on the upgrade,” says Dennis Rains,
technical analyst, Maytag, Newton, IA.
IBM realizes that some cases shops
would have benefited much more by the January hardware. “The
vast majority of customers that purchased hardware in 2002 believe
that they got a good deal. There are a few cases where the customer
didn’t benefit, and we have worked with them on an independent
basis,” says Jarman.
For more on iSeries upgrades, see
www.ibm.com/eserver/iseries/.
Where are the new 8xx benchmarks?
IBM has showcased the Model
890 in benchmark studies, including the study in which the
16-way 890 set a new industry record with 3,600 Secure Socket
Layer (SSL) simultaneous connections in SPECWeb99 SSL benchmark
testing in September 2002. Shops should not expect the same
for the smaller 8xx boxes, announced in January.
“We have benchmark
testing on the the i890, but there are no plans to benchmark
the smaller models. A benchmark is primarily a marketing tool,
and during testing, the configurations are finely tuned and
constricted in order to reach that marketing goal,”
says Ian Jarman, iSeries product manager, IBM, Rochester,
MN.
While benchmarks are good
for bragging rights, IBM feels that there is more to selling
the low-end models than comparing stacked workloads.
“We are more focused
on demonstrating the technologies that people will actually
deploy on iSeries than we are on going over older ground and
benchmarks that already exist. Practically speaking, if you
want to compare real-world performance for workloads, it’s
best to run a sizing tool or go to a competency center,”
says Jarman.
The Three-in-One i810 benchmark
That said, Rochester did
develop the Three-in-One benchmark to mirror the real-world
demands facing their customers. Conducted on an i810, this
was designed to showcase the unique ability of the iSeries
server to run multiple applications under typical, everyday
stresses.
According to IBM, this benchmark
shows that Model 810 customers can successfully run the server
right out of the box, achieve subsecond response times for
multiple applications running simultaneously, and easily handle
unexpected opportunities and demands without adding or upgrading
servers.
For the Three-in-One benchmark,
see http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/hardware/threeinone/.
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