Are you a business owner looking to upgrade your information technology infrastructure? Or perhaps are you gearing for a drastic change in your servers and in your enterprise? If that is the case, you might find the AS 400 from IBM really useful.
What is the AS400?
The AS 400 is now formally called the IBM iSeries. This is also known as AS/400 or eServer iSeries. This is perfect for small businesses and even departments in larger enterprises. This is relatively ideal for their application because this works well in distributed networks with Web applications. This particular model uses the PowerPC microprocessor with reduced instruction set technology.
The reduced instruction set computer is fondly called RISC. This is designed to perform a smaller number of computer instructions. This is helpful in order to heighten its speed since this performs millions of instructions per second. Each instruction given to the computer would require transistors and circuitries.
Now, if you are doing a lot of computer instructions, expect the microprocessor to slow down in operation because of the many and complicated requests
What can it do?
The AS 400 Operating System is also called the OS/400. This boasts of multi-terabytes of disk storage and even a Java virtual memory. This capability of an operating system serves as memory management. This uses both the hardware and the software to allow the unit to compensate should there be physical memory shortages. This is done by transferring the data from your RAM or random access memory to the disk storage. With this command, the virtual address space is then increased by using the active memory in RAM and also the inactive memory on your hard drive. These two then hold both the application and also the data.
There are still a lot of important new uses for this particular piece of hardware. One, it has the capability to serve as a data warehouse. Because of its multi-gigabytes of RAM and also multi-terabytes of hard disk space, there is no denying that the AS/400 can be a sufficient repository of large amounts of company data. Data mining can also prove efficient using this server.
The Java Application Development Integration
Second would be its built-in Java application development integration. There are also new tools designed by IBM aside from its Java virtual machine that can be useful for building commercial applications with the Java platform. Your Java programmers will surely be delighted of this addition. Since this is intended for web servers, this is already equipped with applications designed to support e-commerce. Simply imagine you can be able to take orders, track orders and even provide customer service using this operating system. It also has a built-in firewall installed for that additional security.
IBM has always been pioneering and changing hardware. This also goes for the AS/400. IBM hopes this will be a versatile all-purpose server. The company is hoping it can replace PC servers and even web servers in the business. They are going head to head with Wintel and UNIX servers. But in the end, it has always been the goal of IBM to help its customer base and bring them forward to the future of the Internet.
