IBM AS/400e, User Handbook Manual

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© Copyright IBM Corp. 2000
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AS/400 System Architecture: Underlying Strength of the AS/400e
AS/400 System Architecture: Underlying Strength of the AS/400e
With over 650,000 systems shipped worldwide, the AS/400 system has the highest customer
satisfaction index in the industry, as measured by IBM internal studies. Eleven major factors
contributing to this include:
• Was the first system to deliver 16 Mb and 64 Mb memory cards.
• Offers state-of-the-art 64-bit relational database processing.
• Leads the industry to deliver the first server with Silicon on Insulator (SOI) technology.
• Allows the deployment of Java, UNIX ported applications, Windows 2000, and
Domino-based applications on a single server.
• Directly (natively) supports different file structures, such as PC files, UNIX files,
NetWare files, Domino files, ASCII files, and EBCDIC files.
• Can ship with over 200 processor chips under the covers of a “single” large system.
• Can have 16 Windows NT servers in a single system while sharing the host systems
disk storage, tape, and CD-ROM resources.
• Its object-based design makes it highly virus resistant.
• Has proven it can deliver over 99.9% availability.
• Its operating system can operate for more than one year without ever requiring a
re-IPL, in hundreds of customer shops.
• Delivers vector coded indexes for Business Intelligence applications offering up to ten
times the improvement in performance.
Why should the AS/400 architecture matter to a business person? This section helps you
understand why.
Business leaders do not start by choosing a computer system. They start by choosing an
application to fit their business needs. The AS/400 has tens of thousands of good business
applications worldwide. Because of that, very often the computer system is considered first.
If you compared an application running on an AS/400 system to the same application running
on a non-AS/400 system, you would continue to choose the AS/400 system. Why? Because,
although the two systems can appear to be equivalent today, the accelerating rate of change
of both hardware and software technologies necessitates that the system you select has
been designed with the future in mind. The AS/400 accommodates inevitable, rapid, and
dramatic technology changes with minimum relative effort. Ask any system manufacturer:
What is future-oriented in the system? Does recovering from a failure typically involve a
re-start of the hardware and operating system? What has your record been in the past few
years as technologies have changed?
We believe the IBM AS/400e system will be your
number one choice.