RE: iSeries Imaging (was: Help me Justify iSeries) -- MIDRANGE-L

John -

I think that you'll find that once your users drink the imaging tea they
won't be able to stop.  We have run imaging on the iSeries for 10 years
now.  Originally the retention was three years, then seven, now ten.
Originally we kept 90 days worth of documents live on DASD, then 180
days, now 5 years.  In our case that equates to about 13 million
documents of which 6.5 million are live on Shark DASD fiber attached to
the iSeries.  Our next big project is Enterprise Content Management.

So add scalability to your iSeries justification, Ron.  How well will
your Windows DB server scale past 10 million records?

Regards,
 
Scott Ingvaldson
iSeries System Administrator
GuideOne Insurance Group

-----Original Message-----
date: Fri, 27 May 2005 10:42:20 -0500
from: "Jones, John \(US\)" <John.Jones@xxxxxxxxxx>
subject: RE: Help me Justify iSeries

Nevertheless, the drives should be considered as being engineered for
less than 24x7 duty.  In a business computing environment, this should
be considered an additional risk that can be mitigated by buying
'enterprise-class' storage; i.e. pretty much anything SCSI or a NAS/SAN.
Some businesses may accept the risk; that's fine as long as the risk is
understood.


I originally mentioned the 100K documents/year.  The average size is
supposedly going to be 100-150K so we're talking 10-15GB/year (+ file
system overhead).  Retention rquirements haven't been ironed out yet but
I imagine we'll only keep at most 3 years of images live and archive
anything older.  So a single 35GB drive will likely suffice.  The
incremental cost to grow a RAID set by 1 drive is not bad.  Compare that
to a single-CPU (Celeron, no less) 1-U minimal Dell PowerEdge 750 (the
cheapest rackmount server they have) and you'll see the costs are not
far apart.  The additional drive for the iSeries is actually cheaper
when you factor in an OS for the server (if non-Linux), HW maintenance,
etc.  And that's raw hardware alone.

For administration of the file server, there are a lot of components.
We probably have to provide one for DR (double the hardware costs), it
has to be backed up, it will have to be kept current on patches
(probably), AV (definitely), etc.  Software licenses have to be procured
and kept up to date.  You need a backup device, plan, media, software,
etc.  There's the administrative overhead of tracking everything.  You
have to provide rack, power/UPS, cooling, etc. for it.  For normal
operation, there's not much in the way of troubleshooting performance
issues, but there are plenty of tasks that have to be done, both
one-time and ongoing.  

All of these things are already being done on the iSeries.  Add the
disk, update your backup plan, and run with it.  Much easier & cheaper
to set up and to administer.