RE: Dropping the AS/400 as a Web serving platform -- MIDRANGE-L

fyi, this was sent to me by Andrew Borts...

---------------------- Forwarded by Janet Krueger/dhagroup/US on 09/30/2001
11:31 PM ---------------------------

Janet, I sent this directly to you since my midrange L and WEB400 connection
are broken @ home - and those lists seem to be better places for this
subject.  If you'd like to forward this to those lists, please be my guest.
I never get the time to do this stuff @ work, so I probably wont get the
chance to do this @ theoffice.  I'm working on B2B on our AS/400's doing Web
stuff still, but all E-commerce work stopped Friday.  On the 24th, we'll be
switching over to our new E-commerce servers.

>You explained why shifting to a bigger iSeries isn't affordable -- what are
you
>considering instead?

Not Considering - already outsourced - all to IIS using JSP's as the
technology.  When asked why they don't do the software on the AS/400 - they
answered "For what market?"

>Btw, I agree there is IBM has a major marketing and educational challenge
to
>overcome with the iSeries, but your tirade below seems to point more to a
>pricing and scaling problem...  Did I miss something?

IBM can fix everything but the people situation.  When a drive for quickly
added features was demanded by our marketing team, finding people with the
qualified skills that can perform the work was the hardest lesson we learned
about our shrinking platform.  If your going to go to IBM, first I'd ask for
more advertising.  More advertising, makes more knowledge of the platform.
More knowledge of the platform leads to demand for classes in the Colleges &
Universities.  Colleges & universities would churn out more knowledgeable
people, which would then make more people that demand the platform being
used, instead of half created crud, which everyone seems to accept.  The
more demand, and more knowledge creates people interested in churning out
more software that is in demand.  More demand makes more jobs for our kind
of skills, instead of specializing people in stuff for years on dwindling
hardware, and technology, and not listening to them when it comes to making
the technology known to people other then IBM employees, and families of
people that know them.  Instead, I'll bet that the executives in IBM see the
diminishing orders for AS/400's and wonder why.  So they take away
development $$ slowly but surely, and they are justified, because strangly,
demand has been lower over the years, even though they spent almost $1000 on
advertising, and making up AS/400 pens that they hand out only at AS/400
conferences.  Meanwhile, the business partners are pumped with the knowledge
that they are selling (for IBM) the most technically advanced server ever
and they are on top of the world.  IBM simply used a halfway decent
statistics package and figured out that the AS/400 has a 99% ownership
satisfaction - which makes IBM focus on the best place to advertise.  With
the converted crowd - us.  They are convinced they are doing all they can to
make the product known to everyone .. that currently buys it.  Why advertise
to people that don't buy enough.  Why don't they buy, because they don't
know.  Simple business logic.

>After all, if we go back to IBM with a list of what needs to be done to
make the
>iSeries viable as web serving platform, it needs to be a complete list!

As far as the platform - the following is suggested;
1) Something that is outside the single level storage - but storing
everything in one spot, sharing the IO and sharing disk this way, one can
add HTTP servers @ will, and load balance the heck out of them.  No need to
cluster the expensive disk, when all you need is the HTTP servers
replicated.  Data - stored in one spot is all that is really needed.  The
data is transferred to the back end server in 99% of the web sites, which is
most of the time AS/400's processing the orders on the back end
(Seriously!!).
2) This will create 2 levels of clustering.  Low level clustering that
simply shares the same disk & IO.  Second level is what we have now -
clustering the systems hardware 100%  - Dual systems, and dual disk.  I'd
buy a third AS/400 to manage JUST the disk if it needed a system to perform
this task.  In the PC world, this is the case anyway.
3) Heck - build in a load balancer - the likes of the BIG IP's F5 load
balancer is a good model the drive at - go to their site.  There should be
an SSL acceleration like the F5 as well.
4) Failover support - if I didn't end the server and it fails - re-start the
friggin thing.
5) Better yet - the problem we're experiencing - the "Coffee break/Cigarette
break" syndrome - the whole thing takes a break and doesn't do anything.
This was solved with newer versions of Net.Commerce I understand.
6) Build more Wizards to set up the damn thing.
7) Publishing the friggin industry standard benchmarks, good or bad as to
how the platform performs under pressure.  Apache publishes all the
platforms results - IBM has reported all hardware except the AS/400/iSeries.
Well good or bad, the results of that test - since currently unknown - has
just cost a sale of much more equipment.  We're willing to take our blows,
but since we have no published results to show our any of the people that
approve budgets we all need to submit to receive funding.  Better yet, at
least they could have sped up the discovery process.  This one portion
alone, prevented our purchase of the hardware that could have probably kept
us on the AS/400.

I am the biggest defender of the AS/400/iSeries - I've published articles in
Computerworld defending the AS/400 several times.  I OWN an AS/400
personally (www.ctlaltdel.org ).  Enough is enough.  OS/2 was killed by
Microsoft.  Eventually, the iSeries will be killed by IBM.  If not by them,
it'll be killed by the 100's of companies that do not use it anymore.  It's
a Domino effect - that is taking place all the time.  Our back end will
remain AS/400 for some time.  But how long will that be, remains to be seen.
When will business decisions based on getting more people to get the job
done.  No matter how much business knowledge I have - if there are 5 more
programmers for other platforms, other then the one I'm on.  Someone is
going to do the math soon.  No matter how much the ROI is on the AS/400 -
people will ignore that when they realize they can get more people faster
and easier then they can find people like myself.  More are being produced
every day from Colleges and universities.

Other then my basic job I've been doing for a year and a half, and the fact
that because of our current situation in the world kabashing my trip to
Minnesota, life is going fine here (I guess...) :(   Someone needs to smile
for me as I miss the Bronze Medal picture.

I've been debating on buying myself something to make myself happy - but the
downturn in the economy is making me a little cautious of large ticket
purchases.  Heck some SMALL ticket purchases are being analysed.

-Andrew B.
Work (561) 994-2660x2211
Home (954) 349-0312
Work E-mail Andrewb@setacorporation.com
Home E-mail adborts@attglobal.net
Palm E-mail andrewb@omnisky.net
http://www.ctlaltdel.org