Re: Power7

I usually stay away from these conversations these days because they're fruitless, but I have a moment to chime in.

Hi Nathan,

First pricing. Yeah, the list appears to be $6k - $7k. Then you add a tape
backup, more memory, and then the OS. The software from IBM is very
expensive. Then there is the maintenance and warranty costs per year -
windows updates are free, but with IBM, they cost $$$ as a tiered scale
based upon your licensing costs. With IBM, as your needs grow so does the
IBM revenue stream.

This is one of my favorite misconceptions. "Windows updates are free". Bull puckey. Unless you plan on staying on a back release, you have to expect to upgrade your system - and your applications - to a new OS every three or four years. Each release of Windows requires more hardware to run, and it's usually a pain in the ass to upgrade. Just transitioning your Active Directory from one version to another is a headache.

With i5/OS, upgrading is a hell of a lot simpler.

Until we started to delve into this beast, I thought the cost of an iSeries
was affordable as well. There are numerous hidden costs. Ever wonder why IBM
doesn't publish any of its software prices?

You can get every price for every piece of software at IBM. Then again, you don't need a whole lot of additional software to run an i. i5/OS, development tools and you're just about done. You might add IFPDS, you might add BRMS, but that's most of what you need.

As for performance, all I can say is that I have done it. I have managed and
built web applications that hosted over 25k users with a single Windows
Server 2003 web server and SQL Server 2000. That was a job board and
distributed search engine that served content to a deep affiliate network.
Most of our queries were full-text index searches on job descriptions. Our
database had hundreds of thousands of jobs active in it.

This is my real favorite. A web application is NOT a business application. 25000 users doing job searches is a query, not an application. Dedicate a couple processors to SQL queries and you better be able to run thousands of users. Windows is not built for the sort of business that the i does. The i does mixed-load business applications, combining high-speed queries with complex database updates. Try taking a web application server and running an enterprise business application on it.

If you really have 100k users hitting your app, then your bottleneck is
network and not CPU/memory. Most of your money will be spent getting fat
pipes into your farm and running gig-ethernet on every appliance, possibly
even fibre/infiniband on a backbone.

If you have 100K users hitting your app, you're a different model. I seriously doubt you're going to have 100K persistent sessions to a single machine (although the i can handle that quite handily). No, what you have is 100K users doing simple queries. And for that, yes, a nice little standalone front-end is a good thing - and is exactly what a Linux or Windows box is good for. I in fact recommend a front-end to offload the easy stuff from the i and let it concentrate on the hard stuff.

Published benchmarks are not very useful when building out a scaled network
environment. You need to understand how your users are accessing the
application, what average page load times are, average page sizes, and
partial page caches with caching reverse proxies. All of those aspects of
the application environment are well beyond the scope of a single iSeries.

Again, you're talking about a different and I daresay pretty small part of a business - the high-volume front end. This isn't the part that authorizes the orders or prints the pick slips or manages the inventory or updates the AR. It's either a query application or a storefront. And while that's a cool thing to do, it's also a very minor part of most businesses, other than Google or Monster.com.

As for talent, don't be fooled by the IBM party line. IBM "consultants" are
significantly more expensive than any other IT service provider. You can run
Windows on SUN hardware, so you don't need a Solaris admin. Setting up your
windows network is not hard at all and doesn't require expensive
consultants. You can get affordable help in that aspect of your setup, if
needed. As for SQL server administration, all I can say is that DB2, Oracle,
SQL Server, mySQL, they are all the same. If you don't know how to manage
any of them, then you need help, and ANY DBA worth buying is worth the
money.

"Setting up your windows network is not hard at all". Another fine myth. Setting up a Windows network is not hard. Setting one up well so that it can grow is difficult. Setting up security for distributed offices is an utter bear.

DB2 is no easy "fire and forget" database. You need a DB2 sys admin just the
same as you need one for any other database.

Wrong again. There are three decades of application suites out there running literally millions of users that have never required a single DBA.

Anyway, enough. I'm not going to convince you, but since there seems to be a concerted anti-i effort on the list, I thought I'd chime in and make sure to keep the conversation real and focused on what the i does, not on what it doesn't.

Joe