".. Rob, I thought the mantra was "disk is cheap". IBM disk has never
been as cheap as PC's but that's been the "tax" you pay for the
connivence,
quality, and service of being "i"ntegrated. You have said before
that you don't like off-brands for iSeries disk because they have
more
issues than true IBM drives. .."
I'm with Rob. BTW, I don't think IBM even makes their drives
anymore. I'm sure the DeskStar line has been sold to I think
Hitachi, When I upgraded my 730 to my 810 and migrated my drives, I
removed alot of hardware around the drives. That was probably all
the 'special' hardware that made them expensive. Essentially looks
like a PC server drive. I don't even think their Fibre Channel drives,
standards SCSI.
I'm dealing with the same problem Rob is. We three run Domino servers
on our iSeries (Dvlp, Application, and Home Office email). One
Windows Domino server in our DMZ to route mail to and from our
internal servers. We ended up buying an EMC SAN because IBM disk were
too expensive (Other Open System servers use the SAN). Now some
compliance person says we have to keep a year of email...
That's alot of email (currently use 45 GB for apprx. 20 days
retention). So, hmm, where are we going to store hundreds of GB of
email.. $2500/73GB 15K SCSI iSeries drive or $300/300GB 10K SCSI EMC
drive (remember - long term retention).
How are you going to back up your Linux server?
There are backup solutions for Linux. I'm sure even IBM sells one.
Still way under the cost of a drive.
Now, If you had a SAN (read cheap disk) couldn't you create a Linux
partition on the iSeries and mount that external file system.
> TSM?Oops, the data is back on the iSeries! That's OK, though
because disk is
> cheap. If you start adding in the costs of a tape drive and tapes
for your
> Linux system you may be eating up some of your savings.
You could put a 3581 (LTO) drive on a Fibre Channel switch and share
the resource, I would think. Same tape and drive that you use for
iSeries (assuming you've upgraded you tape technology).
I think IBM is gouging us for disk.. simple.
m.
