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

OK in my defense.  I didn't drop the thing - the company did.  I could argue
many of these things to the people signing my paychecks, but part of the
AS/400 is a perception one, one never defended by IBM, only by us.
3200 per second is a calculation from one of my E-mails of what is being
sent out.  The site needs to respond to 3200 people per second successfully.
One of our partners is sending 1 million e-mails out with the word free (our
web site - www.myfreeitems.com ) they serve millions of visitors per day -
they have the consummate NT farm, and there stuff doesn't sweat.  These are
the people that do GroupLotto.com - they partnered with us to do
grouplottofreeitems.com - my experience with each of these E-mails with the
word free is 25% of them go to the site within an hour of receiving the
E-mail.  If 25% to 50% come to the site (1,000,000) within an hour then
we're looking @ some serious traffic.  The AS/400's are hooked into a
facility with Dual T3's heading @ them, so they have bandwidth @ their
disposal.  Akami technologies caches all of our graphics - so the only thing
the system is doing is html.

>I find this difficult to believe.  3200 per second?  What size is your
>response?  Let's say it's trivial, only 1KB - that's 25MBit/sec, more than
>10 times T1 speed.  You have that kind of pipeline to the Internet?  And if
>your response is anything like a normal page, say 5KB without graphics,
>you're talking over 100MBit/sec, or more than double a dedicated T3
>connection.  You have perhaps multiple T3 lines?  With graphics it quickly
>escalates, of course, to T4 and above.
>
> think you might want to review your numbers one more time.
>
>Joe

>P.S. The first page I clicked to on Seta Corporation was 14KB without
>graphics.  The graphics were another 40KB.  I don't know how large the
Flash
>amimation was, but even at a paltry 50KB total, to support 3200 hits a
>second, we're talking well over 1GBit/sec, or 25 dedicated T3 lines, or 4
>dedicated T4 lines, or roughly twice the bandwidth of the TAT-9
>transatlantic fiberoptic cable.

Janet - I'm not convinced, but I'm damn disappointed.  Decision isn't mine,
but it's the perception of the box that's killing us.  We can make the
server jump through hoops.  What's the point if we can't find the people to
work on it..  You have to convince the marketing team, and the CEO taking
tours of our partners facilities, and then let them field these questions.
We can all spend neat hours re-designing what we had.  But the software that
my marketers wanted wasn't ever going to be loaded onto an AS/400.  The
software company can not justify it.  Saying "If we build it, will you come"
is impossible since the amount of E-commerce solutions for the Store on the
web frankly isn't there in quantity on the AS/400.  Sure - anything can be
built, but the demos will continuously pour into my marketers office.  The
features that are extensions of other packages, will always entice them into
asking for more.  You're arguing with a guy already depressed about loosing
a war I was fighting for a whole year.  I can justify anything to myself,
and many professionals in our field, but the bottom line is its gone.  I
already did the "build it again" route, and since that took too long, in 20
days time, the whole thing will be resting on another platform with ALL the
features that the marketing team has wanted for a while.   Do I agree with
the decision - no.  Does it make good business sense - no.   Do I want to
move everything to racks & racks of NT boxes - no.  But it's been done.

>Sounds like you're determined to believe the racks and racks of PCs are a
better
>deal; your definition of visitors matches my definition of sessions! Did I
>forget to mention that the 830 replaced 5 high end Sun servers?  Or that to
>support the level of traffic the site is recieving now, they would have had
to
>add 15 more Sun servers?  In our client's case, the iSeries is definitely
>providing the lowest cost of ownership he can obtain. But I don't think
this
>level of argument is going to convince you...
>
>Janet Krueger
>Andrews Consulting Group