The Power of i

From Isociety

1:00pm US Eastern Time November 11th, 2008

isociety says: Welcome to the Fireside Chat with Ross Mauri.
Ross Mauri says: hello everyone

Question from Angus: Ross, how is the 'new' job going?
Ross Mauri says: it's been a lot of fun so far ... meeting new clients, new business partners, and completing the unification of the products into Power Systems. As always, there is a lot to learn in a new business ... so I still consider myself a newbie, especially when it comes to the long technical history that most of you all have with IBM i

Question from DrFranken: What has been the feedback for i on POWER Blades?
Question from Eevers: how are the new power i blade servers going over?
Ross Mauri says: so far we have a small number of customers using i blades, but we are getting good feedback from key early users, both in Bladecenter S and H chassis. For example BC-H ... Websphere on i on multiple blades appears to be a popular choice, for BC-S ... we see customers are mixing i blades and x86 blades to build a combined infrastructure. We just completed our first round of worldwide education on blades with business partners. We expect that to pay off in 2009. We are also investing in additional blade support virtual tape and new disk options ... so we will hit some key customer requirements for blades in the first half of 2009

Question from Eevers: do they seem more interested in S or H chassis?
Ross Mauri says: well, we see interest in both ... it really depends on the customers IT infrastructure

Question from DrFranken: When will RAID/Disk cache be available on BCS?
Ross Mauri says: RAID will be available in 1H2009 as well

Question from Eevers: and will BC-S have ability to link to external SAN?
Ross Mauri says: yes, but if you do link to an external SAN, then you will lose the internal disk capability

Question from DrFranken: Any chance we'll get an HMC to connect to a Blade Center?
Ross Mauri says: well, the new IBM System Director will be your answer here ... first off, Director is fully integrated with BladeCenter management. You can launch both iNavigator and HMC functions from Director. I have can someone post a link to a technical website on this topic since I am at the limit of my depth on this one.

LINK from iSociety...
http://www-304.ibm.com/jct03004c/systems/management/director/


Question from DrFranken: From what I've seen the POWER6 stuff absolutely screams - are you hearing that from the field as well?
Ross Mauri says: I heard a lot around Halloween ... but I think they might have been coming from Sun and HP :-)
kidding aside, POWER6 has shown very strong customers around the world as we migrate old and new applications to the platform
Note from Rrlair: We installed power 6 in Dec and it does "scream"
Ross Mauri says: we just announced a 32 core Power 570 ... 4 core 520 and 8 core 550 for IBM i clients ... so we have added more options and performance to the available product line

Question from DrFranken: What's the most exciting application you've seen since the POWER systems and 6.1 announcement?
Ross Mauri says: feedback from customers says that the virtual i partitions support is one of the most exciting new capabilities. Virtual partitions enables you to run multiple images of IBM i without dedicated hardware, so it's great for people who are testing apps

Question from Wrwatson: Can we get 3rd qt Power System numbers shipped with IBM i?
Ross Mauri says: well, no ........................................ but I will tell you that more than half of the worldwide customer shipments were POWER6 based products.

Question from Wtaylor: Hi Ross, will we be seeing more marketing/TV ads for the Power i soon?
Ross Mauri says: our marketing spend to attract new customers is not TV ads ... it's investment in co-marketing programs with ISVs ... we have seen real results from those types of programs because they speak directly to customers business needs more so than a generic TV spot ... and I do realize you all want to see IBM i on TV ...

Question from Pravinjose: one straight fwd question: which among the three is favorite OS of IBM among the three?
Ross Mauri says: come on ... I told you all that we have 3 tier one operating systems for Power. I said that and I meant it ... and I love all my children equally :-) ... and I really think you all want choice.

Question from Rrlair: what role do you see i/OS playing in the new world of SAAS and cloud computing
Ross Mauri says: we already have many partners offering IBM i based applications as a service - those partners are everything from small ISVs .. to the largest ... ie Oracle, JDE. the large ISVS especially like this because it allows them to reach down into small and medium businesses for the future as we move to cloud computing ... IBM i will be participant

Question from Tpm: How is the work going in the recruiting of new ISVs to the i OS platform?
Ross Mauri says: the area we are seeing the most new ISVs is around PHP/MySQL appls - seems that customers are taking advantage of the broad range of open source applications available today and also writing their new appls to this paradigm and I think the ability to integrate these new open source appls into their existing IBM i environment is a key value point

Question from K40: What has been the reaction to the planned discontinuation of native DASD for midrange and high end systems?
Ross Mauri says: well, we have not discontinued internal disk on MR and HE systems, but our large clients have told us they want to take advantage of the flexibility of SAN. Beginning with V6R1 we have invested in manageability and performance for the SAN environment. We are very committed to internal storage for our small and midsize clients ... but we are now seeing requests for low end SAN options there as well and we are currently providing support for that through VIOS under V6R1

Question from Traceyableone: You likely have long range forecasting in place ... in 2009, what % of customers will continue with standalone servers vs % of customers that will migrate their i5/OS workload to a Blade / SAN infrastructure?
Ross Mauri says: in 2009 we think we will still see the majority of our IBM i clients purchasing rack/tower systems, but we do see the adoption of blades picking up to the industry average - which IDC says is 15% (of server spend)

Question from Tpm: In regards to PHP-MySQL applications: When will we see the MySQL plug-in that connects to DB2?
Ross Mauri says: that function is currently in beta ... and when ready will come from MySQL ... hopefully in 1Q09

Question from Angus: What do you see in the future for IBM i?
Ross Mauri says: We are in the early stages of POWER7 development and so just designing v7 ... in fact we had the COMMON americas advisory council in Rochester last week reviewing requirements and current plans for the release. Since we announced Power Systems ... unified the product line ... and brought IBM i into the mainstream. You can be sure where ever the mainstream goes in the future ... IBM i will be there too.

iSociety says: Ross, thanks so much for your time today..
Ross Mauri says: Thanks for having me and listening ... take care all.