RE: What About Price vs. Performance?

Nathan, what exactly do these "applications" do?  On a scale of 1 to 10,
with 1 being a brochureware lookup and 10 being a full-blown
available-to-promise calculation (or perhaps lot/location allocation and
promotions-based pricing of an order line), where does your application fall
in?  How many I/O's per web hit?  What's the size of the database?  How many
users accessing it simultaneously?  What level of availability?  What sort
of commitment control or recovery capabilities?  What sort of failover?

An Intel box is going to run rings around an AS/400 if you're serving up "My
Kitty" pages.  If your "storefront" is something simple - say 100 items with
no features or options - Wintel is a fine way to go.

There is of course still the argument about total cost of ownership.  Wintel
is a great bargain, provided you don't factor in downtime and maintenance.
Personally, I don't remember the last time I could get Best Buy to come out
to my site immediately if a disk drive failed, and I've never upgraded
seamlessly from one Microsoft "OS flavor of the month" to the next.

But, if your particular clientele is people who want rock-bottom prices with
no thought of future expansion, growth, stability or reliability, well, by
all means sell 'em a Wintel box.  And shut off your pager if you want to
sleep.  Provided you can sleep having sold 'em a Wintel box for their
mission critical applications.

Joe


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-midrange-l@midrange.com
> [mailto:owner-midrange-l@midrange.com]On Behalf Of Nathan M. Andelin
> Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2001 10:13 AM
> To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
> Subject: What About Price vs. Performance?
>
>
> "Get thee to the Web".  We've been hearing that from IBM.  But I have
> concerns about iSeries price vs. performance for Web applications.
>
> I've been reviewing published performance data recently on a couple of Web
> applications.  Both applications were hosted on Intel servers.  Microsoft
> Windows technologies were used to develop and host the applications.
>
> I've also been developing OS/400 based web applications lately.  The
> problem, is that these Windows based Web applications perform better than
> mine, and on systems that cost 1/6 that of mine.  The complexity of the
> applications, and the size of the HTML responses, are comparable to mine,
> but the hardware/OS price vs. performance is better by a factor of 7 to 8.
>
> So, how can I expect the iSeries to compete as a Web application server?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Nathan.
>
>
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