Well your admin costs will almost certainly rise significantly.
Routinely we see staff sizes for the windows side of the house at 2 to 3
times the size of the i side and even worse but this definitely depends on
the number of servers.
Unless you have time for weekly reboots you will need all your servers to
be buddied because with the quantity, frequency, and importance level of
windows patches you will be restarting servers frequently.
You will also need to price and acquire a backup solution including
hardware and software. You may get away with the Windows backup program
but this is unlikely - few are successful using it.
You will need to price and acquire an anti-virus product for your servers.
If you don't you will reap the pain of failing to do that. You will need
to keep it current as well (most do this automatically of course) but it
too will occasionally require reboots to activate some updates.
You MUST consider integration with other applications. Almost no
application these days is totally independent from all others but in the
windows world nearly every vendor strongly recommends a single server
single application model. (And if you need redundancy multiply by 2)
Clearly there are some applications that DO play nice together on the same
server but that's fairly rare. Of course with VMware and such these don't
need to be physically different but even so it creates more server
instances to manage.. and more AV to purchase... and more Backups to
manage.... and more patches to apply.
Depending on the application and database in use you may also need to add
a database administrator or two. This is a position we generally just
ignore on i or for the few things we must do on the i the system admin or
a developer handles it.
Strangely you will likely need more space. Sure windows servers are
generally smaller than your basic i but you end up with so many of them.
Add to that you'll likely want a SAN product and tape drives etc that
routinely we see a minimum of double the space for the windows stuff that
used to be done by a single i and often 10 times or more! And all those
servers will use more power. And they will crank out more heat with that
power.
And upgrade planning is a pain. In the windows world there is NEVER a good
'upgrade in place' option that we have always done with i. I have
customers that came all the way from V2 to current without ever reloading.
They've gone from 1990s CISC to today's RISC without needing a
Save/Restore and this is common in the i community. This is virtually
impossible in the windows space. At upgrade time you will acquire new
servers, build them from scratch or possibly an image but you had to build
the first one of those too and load the applications and then migrate the
data. Properly managed this isn't a bad thing in itself because testing
and such are available but it is different and may take significant time
depending on data size. And of course you need to repeat the process for
the backup servers.
For example I am currently standing in a DC with an i570 16 way machine in
three racks which runs the core business application including
development, testing, and legacy partitions. There are ELEVEN racks of
windows servers and SAN storage doing ancillary stuff! plus here are four
additional racks of communications gear, switches, KVMs etc. Blades? Yes,
they use blades too! In virtually every DC I can think of the volume in
lbs, KW, DbA, CuFt, $$s, whatever measure you want to use, is far greater
for the windows stuff than the i.
So as you say no $$s or hard formula's can be applied but some thoughts
for your day.
-Larry
Larry Bolhuis IBM Certified Advanced Technical Expert -
System i Solutions
Vice President IBM Certified Systems Expert:
Arbor Solutions, Inc. System i Technical Design and
Implementation V5R4
1345 Monroe NW Suite 259 eServer i5 iSeries LPAR Technical
Solutions, V5R3
Grand Rapids, MI 49505 IBM Certified Specialist
System i Integration with BladeCenter
and System x V1
(616) 451-2500 System i IT Simplification: Linux
Technical V5R4
(616) 451-2571 - Fax iSeries System Administrator for OS/400
V5R3
(616) 260-4746 - Cell
If you can read this, thank a teacher....and since it's in English,
thank a soldier.
Adam West <adamster@xxxxxxxxx>
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07/30/2008 12:00 PM
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Subject
Ancillary costs in a new non Iseries software solution
HI I know this cannot be done exactly, but in general, if a company, has
currently the 'i' and is considering a new software package, on a Windows
platform what are the added costs that they will have? Leaving aside the
cost of the software which is higher to begin with. I am looking for the
hardware, communications, training, personel, etc. that if you have done
this or considered this option you can speak of.
midrange.com
