Rumors, stories and myths abound about the death of the fabled AS/400 and successor iSeries system made popular when release by IBM nearly thirty years ago. These rumors have been greatly exaggerated as these rock solid platforms, affectionately dubbed as midrange; “the 400” or just 400 by many fans are still alive and well today running in many businesses.

So why should your business consider the AS/400 or iSeries platform in your business? There are many reasons really but let's remove some of the more emotion opinions and get down to the brass tacks of evaluating features from a business standpoint decision.

I address cost factors in more detail in just a moment but I want to get it out of the way that cost is a very minimal factor anymore when it comes to hardware decisions, the money is ultimately in the software and that is where you will want to do the most amount of negotiating with vendors.

You can get as much or as little processing power as you need in any current model system. Weather running a small independent system for a single department with a handful of users to the largest manufacturing operations with hundreds of users and thousands of data transactions you can get an AS/400 or iSeries system with all the storage and processing capacity to fit your needs.

The 400 is a highly reliable all in one platform that can replace several machines. Wintel servers have finally caught up to this realm when it comes to stability in the operating system but if you want to equal the same processing capability you will end up having to cluster many of these types of machines together. So you can kill off your ever increasing server sprawl to run your business applications and can even handle file and printer sharing services for network workstations. With advanced features like enterprise identity management you can even integrate your 400 into active directory with features like single sign on.

Cost is usually a major concern for businesses, brand new these systems tend to run a little on the expensive side. However there is a large used market available, even auction sites like eBay carry selections of used machines and you can find good bargains. A couple of key points to remember before purchasing a used 400 is to check with your IBM business partner to make sure that it can be licensed and that you can cover it with an IBM hardware warranty. And by the way an IBM business partner is just a third party value added reseller that is delegated by IBM to work with businesses like yours to sell hardware, software and services.

By no means would I ever have a critical business computer system without hardware maintenance! The same goes for the AS/400 and iSeries… yes, you can save a little by getting third party maintenance agreements but I would highly recommend doing so. IBMs hardware maintenance is usually on site with replacement parts the very same or next day and the technicians are top notch. Couple this with the ability for your system to phone home when there is a problem like a failed disk drive or bad cache battery it will automatically place the service call and dispatch a tech with the replacement parts.