There are two ways to keep warm in Rochester, Minnesota: work or head south. The hardware and software developers who are the lifeblood of the AS/400 division have been hard at work not only getting the first generation of RISC machines ready for market, but laying the groundwork for AS/400 systems that will be delivered by the end of the century. The bulk of IBM’s AS/400 development efforts are concentrated on creating faster RISC chips for the black boxes and on implementing new software technology that squeezes more power out of those RISC chips than OS/400 currently can. But before all of that gets done, IBM is going to directly address the threat to the AS/400 posed by Compaq Computer Corp personal computer servers running Windows NT. Sometime this year – most likely in the late spring or early summer – IBM will announce a deskside AS/400 system that uses the Cobra 4 (PowerPC A10) chip and supports industry-standard PCI peripherals. IBM intends to put a very low price on the box. IBMers we have spoken to insist that it will have the same price tag as the equivalent Compaq server, in fact.
Foot in the door
While such a machine will not necessarily be useful for IBM’s biggest AS/400 customers, if IBM prices the complete system (hardware, software and maintenance) low enough, it could actually get AS/400s installed at accounts where today its value-added resellers can’t even get their foot in the door. As usual, everything depends on price. While we applaud IBM for its intent to launch a low-cost, low-end RISC AS/400 aimed directly at the Compaq-NT market, we wonder if IBM has seen that Compaq and other personal computer server vendors aren’t just aiming at little AS/400s, but across the whole AS/400 range. And perhaps more significantly, the personal computer server vendors are aiming at each other, which drives the price-performance curve down even faster. The current and forthcoming crops of personal computer servers available from IBM, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard Co are particularly attractive to AS/400 customers that want or need to run a set of applications under NetWare, NT, OS/2 (LAN Server) or Santa Cruz Unix. For instance, while a manufacturing company may have an AS/400 keeping its books and running its shop floors, there is probably no good reason why that company’s personnel applications can’t be put on a personal computer server. While the AS/400 can do all of the same things that a personal computer server can do – it’s a database server for personal computer clients, it’s a file server, it’s a print server, it can get you out on to the Internet – AS/400 applications may not be as slick as those available for personal computer servers.
By Timothy Prickett
This is especially true for Windows NT applications. Moreover, AS/400 servers may not be as cost-effective as PC servers. We are aware that IBM has shown very good price-performance with the first generation of Advanced Servers on the Bapco client-server benchmark tests at Comdex last winter, but times have changed. IBM’s own personal computer servers are just as impressive as its AS/400 Advanced Servers, and they blow away the Advanced Systems. Both Compaq and Hewlett offer PC servers that are even less costly than the IBM alternatives. IBM constantly reminds us that while AS/400 hardware and software is often more expensive than equivalent personal computer server technology, the AS/400 usually has an overall lower cost of ownership. Rarely have we seen this claim backed up with hard data. And the data we have seen did not and could not apply universally across all sizes and makes of mid-range machines at all times. Yes, an E02 was a great machine compared with an 80486 server in 1992. But can IBM hope to get into new accounts with a 510-2144 with a $195,000 price tag when a Hewlett or Compaq P5-133 server with about as much power and memory costs $25,000? Even a base 50S-2121 server (roughly the same as the 510-2144) costs about twice as much as the personal computer server. IBM has a simple choice. If IBM just wants to maintain its AS/400 franchise, keeping relatively high margins, it can continue to charge what it does for AS/400 products. Or the company can come to the conclusion (as we have) that the AS/400 is its best commercial server. IBM can realise that its consistent and persistent strategy to charge more than any other vendor in the mid-range is what really keeps the AS/400 from selling 500,000 units a year instead of 60,000. If IBM were the price leader as well as a technology leader and the volume leader in the mid-range, who could touch it?
Cranking up
During 1996, IBM will concentrate on getting the high-end RISC boxes out the door and selling as many of the RISC machines, large and small, as it can. Other than the A10 PCI box, there may not be any new AS/400s actually shipping during 1996. Of course, this being the new IBM, everything is subject to change. Back in the labs, IBM is going to be cranking up the clock speeds on the PowerPC A10 and A30 processors. It will also be getting the A30 down onto a single piece of CMOS silicon (right now it is a BiCMOS multichip module). At the high end, IBM plans to boost the speed of the A30 to 182MHz from its current 154MHz. That extra speed should give the four-way 530 a RAMP-C relative performance rating of about 140. We assume that IBM will also boost the clock speeds of the fastest A10 chip from 77MHz to 90MHz or 100MHz, which would bring the speed of the largest desk-side 510 processor up to between 33.3 and 37.0 relative performance units. We expect that these faster PowerPC AS chips will appear in products in late 1996 or early 1997. IBM has also said that the faster A30 chip will be picked up by IBM’s RS/6000 group for use in its Unix workstations and servers. The main reason is that the PowerPC 620, IBM’s first choice for bigger RS/6000s, will not be ready before the AS/400 group’s implementation of the chip.
From the January 1996 issue of The Four Hundred. Copyright (C) 1996 Technology News of America, Inc. All rights reserved.
