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

Nathan;

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

        Great - but we have an existing E-commerce solution I was talking about,
and the re-written solution, which was near completion already in the works,
since that's all I've been doing for a year, we were finding problems
scaling the architecture.  The current sites (www.palmbeachjewelry.com and
www.myfreeitems.com ) are running mostly custom written CGI scripts, and
Net.Data macros's with Net.Commerce back end.  Our programming would have
eliminated the Net.Commerce part entirely.  If you need MY help though, I'll
quote you a good price :) I work for beer and pizza mostly...

>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.

        The model I quoted IS the correct web model - what ever the platform.
 Why - the AS/400 never goes down... OK so when would you apply the TCP/IP
PTF's?  When would you IPL the system?  Full backups?  How about hardware
maintenance?  I admit, that I would IPL my systems maybe once every 4 to 6
months, but you MUST plan for this down time, planned or unplanned.  More
un-planned downtime seems to exist in the IIS world, but with 15 other
servers where the one that went down came from, who cares.  Some of the
problems I encountered were extreme.  One of the two UPS's died - and my ISP
plugged in one side of the 270's into one UPS, and the other side was
plugged into the other side.  There's 2 plugs on the 820's and 830's now -
had you heard me talking to Al Barsa with a room full of IBMers @ Common
when I mentioned that the one plug 820 wasn't enough because of human
errors, as well as UPS errors you'd know why there are 2 plugs now.  I'd
still need two of them for redundancy.  24/7 remember - there are no excuses
for 2 hours of down time - even if I only got 500 visitors @ that time.
These people could be buying stuff all over the world.  A Qume PTF would
cost my company about 400 visitors @ 4:00am in the morning.  20 of them
would have bought something.  If someone had me run the system on a
mainframe, I'd buy at least 2 of them too.

        The scale I'm talking about is between 500 and 3000 visitors per hour.  
If
you're working at 500 to 3000 visitors a day, the AS/400 works great.  If
people were experiencing that level of performance on an AS400 in E-commerce
land (not on an internal network!) I'd be surprised if the list topped 5
companies @ that volume.

        As far as database speed - the AS/400 is the fastest in the world - bar
none.  But we're serving web pages, and I need to keep them going 24/7
without hesitation.  There needs to be benchmarks published how this stuff
will perform.  Apache looks promising to bring the AS/400 into more
interesting worlds, but the benchmarks are published for everything BUT the
iSeries.  You try going into a CEO's office without documentation, and tell
them to buy 1.4 million in servers just because you have a feeling, and
you'll see how much of a laugh you'll get.


>From: "Nathan M. Andelin" <nandelin@relational-data.com>
>To: <MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com>
>Subject: Re: Dropping the AS/400 as a Web serving platform
>Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2001 09:35:07 -0600
>Reply-To: midrange-l@midrange.com
>
>> 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