RE: Help me Justify iSeries

Granted, Joe, I'm optimizing some.  But my point was the opportunity
cost of storing that many images.  I actually buy the biggest & fastest
disks available so my current i5 uses 70GB 15Ks and my new one will use
the 140GB 15Ks.  But even one of those 140GB 15K drives is under $5K
list and there ar no administrative or maintenance costs, ever.  As long
as you've got the disk slot open it's an easy install and integrates
with everything you're already running.  Your backups don't change, you
still don't need AV software, your rack space doesn't grow, your power
requirements don't really grow, your KVM requirements don't grow, etc.

My scaling up the PC costs reflects reality.  The machine needs to be
backed up; add a tape drive or something else to back it up (I didn't
mention potentially higher off-site tape storage costs for additional
tapes).  It needs to be rackmounted to fit a modern data center; doing
otherwise (putting it on a shelf in the rack) will waste space (which is
at a premium).  We have a standard server build that includes Windows;
we're not staffed to support Linux so admin costs for a Linux-based
solution would be astronomical by comparison.  I would most companies
have a DR plan for everything in production; that needs to be factored
in since this is production data.  NAS devices or servers take more
power & cooling than a single extra drive.  

Anyway, agreed that everyone's situation is different.  For some, the
additional iSeries disk may not make sense.  But if you've go the disk
slot open, it most likely will be cheaper when you consider all factors.


Finally, I would think that most shops with an i5, if they've grown
beyond the 6-8 disks in the CEC, already have sufficient capacity to
simply take on the images without even buying the additional disk.
Unless their capacity planning was really, really tight & they're
running their systems above 90% full.