Like most people who never wrote a single line of RPG, I used to think that the IBM eServer iSeries platform (formerly known as AS/400) was legacy, proprietary, irrelevant. After spending two days with the iSeries folks in snowy Rochester, MN, I realize that my perception was simply wrong, period.

Today, iSeries should not be considered as a (proprietary) development platform anymore, for most new applications built on top of it are developed using J2EE. Instead, iSeries should be viewed as a consolidation platform that can replace multiple Linux and Windows servers with a single server running i5/OS — formerly known as OS/400. When five boxes turn into one, support and maintenance costs go down. The technologist in me does not get really excited by that alone, but the entrepreneur does.

What makes this possible though is some of the most advanced virtualization technology available on the market and the ability to run multiple operating systems from a single environment, including AIX, Linux and Windows. Features usually offered only by mainframe systems (what IBM calls zSeries), such as partitioning and load balancing, make the platform linearly scalable from 1 to 64 ways, while offering a simplicity of management that is akin to science fiction with a cluster or SAN architecture.

This ability to consolidate multiple systems into one comes at a price (i5/OS is not exactly cheap), but real-world TCO calculations make the iSeries platform a very attractive solution from a financial standpoint. Now what makes the approach particularly interesting to me is that at a time when grids and server farms are all the rage, the iSeries team is taking a very different approach and asking the right question: “why do we need all this complexity?”

Anti-conformist vision, cutting edge technology, actually funny advertising. Is iSeries cool or what?