New System i Collaborative Edition

iSeries Network has an article about two System i announcements (note to self, it's not i5, iSeries, or AS/400 any longer). The first is the availability on May 19 of an iSCSI adapter.

The second is the premiere on June 13 of a "System i 520 Collaboration Edition".

"The 520 Collaboration Edition offers as much as a 33 percent price break from equivalent 520 Standard Edition machines when configured with extra memory and disk to accommodate Lotus workloads and purchased with qualifying Lotus software solutions such as Notes/Domino, WebSphere Portal Express, Sametime, Workplace Services Express, Workplace Collaboration Services, and others.

"The 520 Collaboration Edition offers 1 or 2-way processing power and has a minimum of 4GB of memory and four disk drives to support collaboration workloads. The box requires a purchase of select Lotus collaboration software licenses or the transfer of existing Lotus licenses to the new Collaboration Edition."

When we purchased Domino back in 2002 (basically right when ND6 was released), we started with a 2-way iSeries 270 Dedicated Server for Domino (DSD). It is now functioning as our cluster failover box as we are using a 4-way iSeries 820 as our main system. It runs very well and we're looking at an upgrade to a 4-way 570 later this year with Domino in an LPAR running on 2 of the processors.

The new System i processors are amazing. I mentioned the "Cell chips" back in August. This isn't the same chip being used by the new System i, but Big Blue is doing a lot with the processors. The new System i Collaborative Edition should be a good start for SMBs wanting to get rock solid performance at a decent price! So go pick one up in June...

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