Edit: Link no longer works.
Originally posted February 24, 2009 by IBM Systems Magazine
I recently read this iDevelop blog post and it got me thinking. I too have been involved in these discussions with a local IBM i user group that recently had a conference planned. The group was forced to cancel the event due to lack of attendance. Was that due to less and less actual users of the platform? Was that due to budget constraints or time constraints, where people just couldn’t take the time to spend a day away from the office? Or had people lost their jobs because their companies went out of business? The conference planners are not sure. All they know is that they wanted to attract enough bodies to their event to cover costs, so they thought that a combined i and AIX conference would be a good thing.
By combining their conference, they had hoped to introduce i people to AIX and Linux. They planned to offer some introductory level tracks so that IBM i people could learn more about AIX. At the same time, introductory tracks were planned to give AIX administrators a better understanding of the benefits of IBM i. But besides the intro classes, power-user sessions were planned, aimed at the serious administrators from both camps.
I was at virtual I/O server (VIOS) training last year that was aimed toward users of IBM i, and it seemed to me that this group didn’t want to hear the message that was being delivered. Instead of trying to understand how IBM i using VIOS attached to external storage would be a good thing to consider, they seemed to focus on how this would be a different way of doing things and they seemed resistant to learning about it.
I also attended an IBM event that featured technical lectures for both i and AIX users, and I watched IBM i users walk out, because they said the event was too slanted toward AIX.
I can certainly agree with the points that the authors of the iDevelop blog make, where you might think that people are watering down content or leaving out sessions in order to accommodate both groups. However, combining events like this might also be an advantage to the attendees. Many shops run IBM i, but they are also running HP servers, Sun servers–some flavor of UNIX. This means that besides the investment in IBM i, these shops are also investing in other vendors’ solutions.
Instead of using all of this different hardware from all of these different vendors, why not consolidate and virtualize the Power Systems server running IBM i in a partition and some number of AIX LPARs in other partitions? While this seems pretty straightforward to someone with an AIX background because we think nothing of running different operating systems and different versions of the same operating system on the same frame, some IBM i people might not realize that this is possible, or what the benefits might be.
There might be discussions in some organizations about eliminating that IBM i machine that just sits in the corner and runs, and taking that workload and running it on Windows or Linux or some flavor of UNIX. If all you understand is IBM i, it might be difficult to articulate its pros and cons versus the other operating systems. There can be a perception that IBM i is still a green-screen 1988 legacy system, instead of a powerful integrated operating system that frankly could use better marketing and education so that more organizations were made aware of its benefits.
If IBM i administrators aren’t keeping up on the trends in the UNIX space, they might be missing a great opportunity to help extend the longevity of their IBM i investments, both in hardware and knowledge. By running more of their company’s workloads on the same hardware from the same vendor, they are now benefiting from having “one throat to choke” if things go wrong, but better than that, they are running the best server hardware currently available.
The problem is, without understanding the basics of AIX and VIOS, and why it can all coexist happily on the same hardware, IBM i administrators might have a difficult time making the case to their management team that this server consolidation could be the way to go.
The IBM technical university that was held in Chicago last fall was a great example of how this can be done–hold tracks that appeal to IBM i administrators and those that appeal to traditional AIX administrators. Let attendees freely move between tracks so that they can learn more about the “other side.” Although they won’t become experts after a few sessions, they should at least start to understand the lingo, the jargon and the benefits that come from the other operating system. AIX administrators might be surprised to learn just how good IBM i is, while i administrators might also be pleasantly surprised to learn just how good AIX is.
Change can be scary, change can be hard, but change will come. How will we deal with it? Will we try to keep our traditional user groups doing the same old thing or will we try to learn more about other technologies? By telling the IBM i story to AIX administrators, at a minimum there will be more people out there that understand the basics of why it is so good, and who might be eager to make the case to management that consolidation might make sense.