Re: Scalability

Don and Joe, I think there is a missing piece here... or maybe I just
missed it in the exchanges...

With the iSeries, you are told, and it is true, that you don't need a
"Mongolian Horde" to manage the system.

And so, most shops using this platform, indeed, only have one person
doing the admin. I agree that most are "home grown" and the skills are
unique to the platform and therefore valuable to other interests, not
just the current employer.

Business execs don't like single points of failure and a _significantly_
reduced staff of admins represent a single point of failure. Business
execs do not like to have one person in a "god like" position, which has
been what I see happen most often in the iSeries world.

And, company owners, principals, presidents... have all, at one time or
another, said to me... "... but I can hire someone to do that, so why
shouldn't it be about the application _only_? Why shouldn't I get
exactly what I want in functionality?"

Many of those same people can also argue that the benefits of employing
more than one person is good for more reasons than we can cover here.

So, many execs see the limited or reduced need for iSeries Systems'
Admin and admins more as a possible liability to business continuity and
therefore give it a much lower priority than those of us in the iSeries
community would assign to that same attribute.



On Sat, 2005-02-05 at 09:33, STenore@xxxxxxx wrote:
> IBM should take these words that Joe wrote and actually market it this way,  
> they'll never do it, but you speak the truth!! Well said!! We Have 160 AS400  
> systems up and down the east coast and we have about 15 or so AIX systems, 
> p690,  etc. Our AS400 staff is 3 people, the aix staff is 3 times that. We 
> are  
> constantly reminded that the company direction is AIX and Oracle even with 
> the  
> constant backup, files system issues, etc. that the AIX system continue to  
> have....... back on the poor old AS400 side, they just run, and run, and run, 
>  
> maybe close to 99% uptime, worst failure cache battery!!!
>  
> I have to out this back on IBM for not wanting to "hurt" the other systems  
> by actually marketing the AS400 system like it should be
>  
> 
> Now I'll get off the soap box!!!
>  
-- 
"Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same."
-- Oscar Wilde