Re: Windows Integration and Longhorn

Exactly. To your point of reliability one of the biggies for IXS is that the number of driver issues is essentially *zero. IBM tests all possible combinations of the one video driver, one LAN driver, and one Disk driver. (Let's see that's um, one?!) They can test the dickens out of that and assure that they all work in harmony. Go to external stuff and the potential combinations are legion. Plus the are purpose built reliable hardware living inside a well cooled and reliably powered cabinet It don't get much better than that.

When you consider the average Intel CPU putzes along at 4% busy the fact that they only come in 2Ghz models is nearly a 'so what'.
- Larry

Jones, John (US) wrote:

No backups to manage. No server hardware to manage. No disks to manage, RAID to
rebuild, etc. No footprint/power/HVAC to manage in the rack. No maintenance
contract to maintain. No physical cabling required (can VLAN & use host
iSeries LAN).
They're just simpler to deal with.
I'd add that for some reason the IXS cards seem to be less likely to lock up or suffer other quirks than regular servers. The first one I had, for instance, was a 233MHz Pentium 2 with 256MB RAM running NT 4. Rock solid; would stay up for months on end with no problems at all. The current IXS models seem to be just as reliable when running Server 2003.