IBM i Strategy and Roadmap

Welcome to 2010. It will be a busy one for us with the introduction of POWER7 processor-based servers and the next release of IBM i. These will provide Steve, Dawn and me ample material for future posts.

We have recently published a new white paper that you’ll want to put on your must-read list for the new year. The paper is designed to help you gain a better understanding of our strategy and roadmap for the IBM i operating environment. It includes information about the IBM i market, reviews the Power Systems and IBM i roadmap, and concludes with a listing of the wide range of IBM initiatives to help businesses reduce costs, improve service and manage risk. We trust it will be a page-turner.

 

ITG TCO Report – IBM i Wins Again!

ITG has just concluded an analysis of the value of Power Systems and IBM i compared to x86 systems for mid-sized clients. Costs for use of Power Systems and IBM i 6.1 average 41 percent less than for commodity x86 servers and Microsoft Windows, and 47 percent less than for x86 servers and Linux operating systems. Read the new ITG report Executive Summary or Full Report for details. Low total cost of ownership, or TCO, has long been a benefit of IBM i deployments according to numerous consultant reports and feedback from our IBM i clients.

One of the benefits for IBM i clients of the unification into Power Systems has been the fact that IBM i, AIX and Linux run on the same set of servers with the same purchase and maintenance prices. This has made our historically low TCO even better.

 

More Webcasts Are Coming

Our Webcasts through System i Network have been very popular and a great vehicle for us to communicate product announcement and to highlight key technologies. Plans are being finalized to deliver three more in the first half on 2010.

 

IBM i Vouchers

Did you know that clients receive service and education vouchers for no additional charge with the purchase of selected new Power servers with IBM i? You can redeem the services voucher for an on-site service by IBM Lab Services or a qualified business partner. Select from a wide range of services including help with migration, DB2 Web Query implementation, Zend PHP implementation, security assessment and PowerVM virtualization implementation. The education voucher can be redeemed for a no-charge class. Our voucher Web page provides information on qualification requirements, the list of available services and education, and steps on how to redeem your vouchers.

 

Customer Spotlight

Recology turned to IBM to help meet a short runway for designing, building and moving to a new data center. Over its 80-plus years of business, San Francisco-based Recology has been an innovator in waste disposal and resource recovery. It was one of the nation’s first urban recyclers and one of the largest employee-owned companies in the waste management field, serving more than 600,000 residential and 60,000 commercial customers in more than 50 communities, primarily on the West Coast.

Recology turned to IBM Global Technology Services to design and deliver a future-ready data center for its Power Systems running IBM i and System x environment. The data center is now up and running and has improved availability through enhanced redundancy, expanded data-center capacity to support a near doubling of business and reduced costs up to 20 percent through improved efficiency. Learn more about Recology. 

 

 

Comments

[Huh?]

Wow this is a very vague article. There is no meat to the article and doesn't seem to take into account that people are virtualizing the Windows boxes these days with tools like Hyper-V which are so cost effective that it makes IBM's SKU's for the same functionality look like a joke.

Also a counter point to this is the following: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/mainframe/whoknew/thebottomline.aspx

One of the things IBM i folks always tout is that they can do more things with one box. You can do the same with Windows or Linux servers, the question is do you want to build a big single server with lots of disk arms and load all of your stuff on one machine for a single point of failure or would you rather distribute it? If the answer is to distribute it for better fault tollerence then the ROI has disappeared with IBM i, if it even existed in the first place.

It's atleast good to see that IBM is continuing to improve on the hardware side of the arena even though the software side of things is still very much lacking. When I say lacking, I say what sort of system requires your server to go down for backups (GO SAVE, option 21). No windows box that I know of has that problem, you can backup the entire system without bringing the box down.