Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said System i customers might have "freaked out" if IBM had tried to merge the product lines five years ago, because they might have thought it was killing off the products. "The difference today is they have got used to these platforms merging; it's pretty clear now that IBM isn't walking away from System i."
IBM will apply the existing System p prices to the new server family, Handy said. That means prices shouldn't change for what used to be a System p server. For "i" customers, "they get that common hardware pricing, so they'll pay a little bit less for memory and disk," Handy said. With the software as well, "an i customer will pay, at the solution level, about the same as before," he said. However, replacement and add-on components should cost less.
Customers will be able to configure the servers with the software they want, and IBM will offer an "i edition" for customers who want what used to be the i5/OS stack, Handy said.
IBM renamed i5/OS because the 5 doesn't signify anything and is misleading as IBM moved from Power5 to Power6 processors, Handy said. IBM was probably unable to use iOS because Cisco Systems has an OS with a similar name. "That's something we looked at that really wasn't available in the industry," Handy said, adding that he liked "the simplicity of i" after he got used to it.
"It's a new generation of Power systems in the sense that we now have one product line from bottom to top that runs all the OSes as tier-one operating systems -- it's AIX, Linux, and i in any combination you want, so that's a pretty radical shift from where we were," Handy said.
The new systems announced Wednesday are the Power 520 Express, which IBM called "an affordable server for businesses running distributed applications and databases," the Power 550 Express, "a mid-sized database server," and the BladeCenter JS12 Express, which has IBM's EnergyScale power management technology. Pricing and hardware specifications were not immediately available.
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