RE: Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch

From: Jones, John (US)

Joe, you might have missed a couple of my recent posts on this so I'll
recap my problem.  We're running Oracle EnterpriseOne (E1) a.k.a. JDE
OneWorld.  End of recap.  ..  Well, for clarity I'll continue. The main
E1 layers are:

Thanks for the clarification, John.  I know I saw your earlier posts, but I
kind of zeroed in on the specific question, because it's one that lots of
people are asking.  In fact, the very high incremental costs of WAS are
exactly the type of thing that actually lends credence to Steve Richter's
regular refrain of "geared down expensive CPU".

I think somebody might have mentioned the idea of creating what would in
effect be a "WAS-only" partition, in which memory and CPU would be much
cheaper than the same components for i5/OS.  This is an appealing notion,
but one which then begs the question of why not make it cheaper for i5/OS?
Which would lead to in effect unbundling i5/OS and then seeing if it really
could stand on its own... but that's a completely theoretical discussion and
thus not particularly germane to your situation.

I agree that WAS isn't really a great app for the iSeries to run.  My
personal fear (which can be at odds with what's best for the firm) is
that if WAS moves off, what's to keep the app logic and/or database from
moving off when the system needs the next upgrade and management balks
again?

This is indeed the issue, especially with a vendor that is clearly marketing
a cross-platform solution.  This is a tough nut, and is ultimately the one
that will make or break the iSeries.  As other people have suggested over
the years, more and more it is application software that ultimately sells
boxes, and unless vendors take advantage of the strengths of the box, it's
unlikely that the box will receive any impetus from those applications.

Unfortunately, most large software vendors have a hard time justifying
separate product lines and so unless there is a specific move by IBM to make
i5/OS a fiscally successful separate revenue stream, these same vendors will
continue down the path of less powerful but more lucrative "platform
independent" architectures.  And companies like yours will be hard pressed
to justify the ongoing cost of the more expensive box.  In effect, the
iSeries will be perceived as a luxury item.

However, as I've pointed out, if you compare the real costs of moving
non-appliance level code (that is, your business logic and database) to a
non-integrated solution, the costs quickly mount.  As a simple exercise, try
pricing the sort of backup devices that you would need to reliably protect a
server farm and you'll see what I mean.

Joe