Re: Getting a new IBM i - need advice

Aaron,

After my difficult beginnings with the Bladecenter, I am in a position to recommend it now. A couple of things to consider:

Although the initial cost was slightly higher, over the long run the cost of adding another blade is small. The consolidation of resources is great and the BCS can be used with other IBM blades (my son quickly filled the other slots with dual core xeon intel blades with 8Gb RAM for about $125.00 each - HS20's I think). Those blades use the CPM for network access (although we have considered going to a switch), and, if they had SAS controllers, we could use the existing DASD. So there is a savings in the consolidation.

I use LAN console, the AMM and the IVM (Integrated Virtualization Manager) to manage the BCS and blades, The LAN console hasn't been an issue for me.
It's something to think about. Rather than add your next IBM i as a box, you could stuff in a new blade. Lukas can probably weigh in on other aspects of going blade. I know that performance has been bantered about because of the lack of many disk arms.

After a very shaky start, the BCS/JS12 blade has turned out to be trouble free. Right now the IVM shows 89 days of continuous uptime.

My original configuration can be seen here: http://www.petesworkshop.com/downloads/BladeCenterS-i-Edition-R4.pdf

FWIW.

Pete


Aaron Bartell wrote:

I have started the process of purchasing my second IBM i. Because of all
the changes in how the box is sold and what software is included (or not) I
wanted to run it by the group here to see if I have what I need. Because
this is done through the PartnerWorld ISV program I get most any IBM
software at no additional charge so please let me know if there is any cool
new software that would be worth loading "just to check it out".

What is this box going to be used for?
- Primarily software development for RPG related products/tooling, though we
do accomplish a fair amount of Java here and there.

- Need to have user licenses for four developers (which we should be covered
there as 5 are included by default, though they mention 10 in other places -
not sure what that means).

- Going to be digging into SQL a lot more on this box so any SQL or DB2
tooling that I might need please make note.

Here is what the initial config looks like that IBM sent out:
http://mowyourlawn.com/files/Krengel-8203-E4A-V6R1.pdf

I went here to grab a few other options to include for software:
https://www-304.ibm.com/jct01005c/isv/business/member/hw/na/us/systemi_products.html

In particular I asked them to add the following software:
5733-RDI
5733-SOA
5722-DR1
5722-DVP
5722-IP1
5722-SVP
5733-QUB
5733-QU3
5733-QU4
5722-AP1
5722-BR1
5722-CM1
5722-CR1
5722-DE1
5722-MG1
5722-NLV
5722-SM1
5733-CY1
5761-DG1 (Apache HTTP server)
5761-JV1
5722-JC1
5733-OMF
5761-TC1
5761-XH2
5761-XL1
5722-WE1
5722-XP1

On a final note, does anybody know if you have multiple LPARs of IBM i on a
single box without having an HMC? Oh, one last question. I have learned to
despise the LAN Console because it rarely works (i.e. it always tells me I
have password sync issues from my pc to the server and I then get the fun
job of resetting it from the hardware control panel) and am thinking of just
getting a dumb terminal. What kind of connection would I need to get for a
dumb terminal?

Thoughts?
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com