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

ANY system needs failover support! Tell me that the AS/400 on the 72nd floor
of tower two is still running? Of course not. What about uptime related to
_planned_ downtime? PTF applies? OS upgrades? Hardware changes? By having
multiple front end servers (AND backend servers) the loss of a single
machine (planned or unplanned) doesn't bring down my site.

-Walden
------------
Walden H Leverich III
President
Tech Software
(516)627-3800 x11
WaldenL@TechSoftInc.com
http://www.TechSoftInc.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Nathan M. Andelin [mailto:nandelin@relational-data.com]
Sent: Monday, October 01, 2001 11:35 AM
To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
Subject: Re: Dropping the AS/400 as a Web serving platform


> I OWN an AS/400 personally (www.ctlaltdel.org ).

Cool site.  Was that a painting of a black box going up in flames <smiling>?

> When asked why they (an IIS solution provider) don't do
> the software on the AS/400 - they answered "For what market?"

Relational-Data (www.relational-data.com) would have been happy to provide a
bid for an OS/400 based e-commerce application.

> 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.

Do I understand correctly?  Add capacity by front-ending the iSeries
database server with a cluster of lower cost boxes?  Sounds like a page
right out of Microsoft's script!  Let me ask.  Is it more efficient for the
iSeries database server to build an ODBC or JDBC formatted stream, than to
build an HTML formatted stream?

In my testing, an AS/400 can serve dynamically generated HTML just about as
fast as it can serve ODBC data.  So adding an extra layer of hardware in
front of your iSeries is an unnecessary extra cost.  If your iSeries can't
handle an HTML load, it can't handle an ODBC or JDBC load either.

I'll tell you the real reason that IIS application providers recommend
clustered, load balanced IIS servers.  It's such an unstable platform to
host their applications that they use multiple servers to improve overall
uptime.  It's not a capacity issue.  OS/400 doesn't need failover support.
It's already stable.

Nathan M. Andelin
www.relational-data.com



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