> The solution for customers with lots of small iSeries/System i > boxes today running IBM i (formerly i5/OS formerly OS/400) is to
Good grief -- it's like going to IKEA with these folks. Name change just Because We Can. > put in a Power blade (JS12 or JS22). You save a lot of space and > get to share a BladeCenter with x86 blades. Yes, that's a possibility, but it doesn't really address the base problem, though, which is to reduce the number of platforms to 1 or 2 at the most. What we observe is the customers stratifying down to Intel + Z (mostly due to the embedded nature of z/OS into core business), and any of the specialty architectures are having a lot of rough sailing to stay in play. Certainly SPARC and PA-RISC are past it, and losing Apple put a really big nail in the Power coffin. While I really like the Power chipset design and the pSystem management tools, it's a very difficult sell right now unless you have specialized problem sets that play to its strengths (large-vector operations like those common in bioscience or image processing). Writing an emulator for the iSeries on Intel would pretty much kill its advantages for non-NIC completely; the cost per performance numbers are just too good for raw MIPS on Intel/AMD compared to the cost of support for exotica.
