James Governor's Monkchips

Oracle on iSeries and The Green Screen of Death

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iSeries, the platform formally known as AS/400, continues to surprise. I am sitting here at IBM annual Systems and Technology Group analyst event in Rome listening to the latest news about iSeries trends and opportunities.

One topology that got me blinking and thinking was the idea of running Oracle on an iSeries box. For as long as I can remember iSeries has been not just the sworn enemy of Oracle, but also a one trick pony from a database perspective. Indeed the classic anti iSeries FUD was that not only was iSeries DB2 only, but it wasn’t even the same DB2 as ran on Unix or the mainframe. So what’s with Oracle on the box?

The capability of running Oracle on the server is a direct result of IBM’s drive to standardize its iSeries and pSeries infrastructures. That is, customers can now choose to partition the iSeries and run Linux, i5OS or AIX on the box. That is pretty open. And that means Oracle.

Customers that are now consolidating Oracle on Unix servers include Flintshire County Council (story here) and another firm called Greif.

Flintshire is interesting because it is now running Oracle Financials and iSeries-based SSA Baan ERP applications on one box, after consolidating some 30 servers. In this case iSeries kicked out an HP-UX box….

Now all IBM needs to do is to get Microsoft to wake up and smell the POWER coffee… although obviously an iSeries box running SQLServer natively on POWER might not have the-ahem-uptime characteristics-customers expect and demand from the AS/400. Are we ready for the green screen of death?

One comment

  1. Hmm. Microsoft has already smelled the POWER coffee and have, in fact, been imbibing quite liberally: the next Xbox has three POWER processors and one would be a fool not to speculate that they are considering using a binary traslation/virtualization layer to enable Windows to run on the platform.

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