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

> From: "Andrew Borts"
>
> 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.

Right.  Net.Data and CGI are not known for scalability.  It's too bad you've
learned that the hard way.

> The model I quoted IS the correct web model - what ever
> the platform... you MUST plan for this down time, planned
> or unplanned...

Back in college, my Operations Management professor stressed the importance
of having backup system when uptime was critical.  When one system is down,
the other takes over.  He stressed that if a system had a 1% failure rate,
and a backup was available, then the probability of downtime was 1% of 1% -
or 1 out of 10,000.  In the case of planned downtime, then just route
traffic to the mirrorred system.

Did I misunderstand the model you proposed?  To front-end an iSeries
database server with multiple Web servers?  In either case, the database
server could have some downtime.  How would the front-end Web servers
prevent that?

My point was to address your scalability issue.  Some people think that
using IIS to generate the HTML from data retrieved from the iSeries is more
scalable.  They reason that much of the work is offloaded to low-cost Intel
computers.  Maybe it is more scalable than CGI and Net.Data.  But it's not
more scalable than a message architecture, such as the one I used to build
my product.

If you want to move some of the work to low-cost Intel servers, may I
suggest that you (or people, in general) use IIS to serve static pages,
while using the AS/400 to dynamically generate HTML?  It streamlines the
development and deployment environments, offers equivalent scalability, and
costs less overall.  As I mentioned before, it takes about as much work to
generate an ODBC or JDBC formatted stream as it does to generate an HTML
stream.

After your new system goes into production, I hope you'll provide a report.
Since it's competing against CGI and Net.Data, then it may offer more
scalability.  I don't know.  But I'd bet you'll be fiddling with it more
often than your OS/400 hosted solution.

> 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.

Sounds like you should.  The people who have to manage 15 other servers will
eventually care.

> The scale I'm talking about is between 500 and 3000 visitors
> per hour.

That doesn't sound too big.  I'd estimate that a 1100 CPW 820 could serve
about 40 dynamically generated pages per second.  Or 144,000 hits per hour.

> Apache looks promising to bring the AS/400 into more
> interesting worlds, but the benchmarks are published for everything
> BUT the iSeries.

I agree that an AS/400 offers poor price/performance in comparison to Intel.
But I'm more interested in total cost of ownership.

Nathan M. Andelin
www.relational-data.com