Re: Food for Thought

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 11:12 PM, Wintermute, Sharon <
Sharon.Wintermute@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

So for a standard web app that required data you had about 6 different
servers involved. The SQL server was different than the app server which
was different from the exchange server, so on and so forth. During
this long drawn, it became clear that in his mind it require at least 4
people to keep the thing running and would be available about 80% of the
time. I just sat there and laughed at him.

Most of the server segregation thing is done to keep troubleshooting easier,
as it removes interactions between third party software packages. This is
also the reason why virtualization is such a big topic in the Windows world,
and not so much in the Linux world. As for needing 4 people to maintain 6
Windows servers - these figures are made up :)

I informed him that I had all those servers consolidated onto one server
(my System I) that never failed and had a consistent 99.95% up time. I
described how the system could manage all the functions at once and keep
them all running with merely one system and one support person.

Depends on what scenario you were talking about exactly. Microsoft offers
it's SBS product, which is a one-server solution for solving most of a Small
Business infrastructure needs - and it works very well. And there is a a lot
of functionality that an IBM i partition just can't provide - especially
management of the client platform comes to mind.

This is a common fallacy with most IBM i proponents - there's more to it
than just the business apps. You'll also need to get all that other stuff up
and running.

For almost all companies, the question is not "Windows Server or IBM i" but
"Windows Server or (Windows Server AND IBM i)".

Of course he tried to say the cost was the problem. I quickly pointed

out the error of his statement. Between the cost of licensing all those
smaller M$ servers, hardware costs, personnel costs, and lost business
costs, I proved the System I was a much better investment. (This was
before the Power systems existed.)

Well, most IBM i shops i know do not have test/development systems that are
identical to their production systems, mostly because of cost reasons,
making it impossible e.G. to test new firmware or HMC updates on test
systems first, as they only run test in an LPAR on their production machine
and have only one HMC.