Re: Moving forward or backward...

OK, My 3 cents.

First, the original Power 520's were throttled down, I have one and it works just fine for my limited needs as a single user. The base model only has one disk drive mirrored pair and the OS takes up most of the space. However, I can run multiple process on it and use it for testing and the response is acceptable as long as I am careful in regard to the disk storage. Try that on Windows of the same vintage and see how many times a month you have to re-boot the thing to keep it stable.

So, I totally concur in regard to your statements about the original 520 base model. It seemed clear to me that IBM WAS out to milk the i/5 to a slow and undeserved death.

The world, however, does turn and the IBM i is no longer throttled as it was and the box is ideally suited for mid-range business needs and for very large companies with the need for a dependable, high availability, high rate transaction processing system. It scales well in a clustered environment and the utilization for added CPUs scales exceptionally well.

Although you can find problem areas like email, the box provides more technology options than any other platform in existence. It supports all of the major file systems. It's tuned for business transaction processing and can run other environments reasonably well. RPG is a match for the system in a way that C/C++, or any other language can be because RPG is designed for the transaction processing environment. Not that the other languages run badly on the box.

In conclusion, please stop using a hobbled, over priced system for your comparison when there are many other models out there that can slam your Windows/UNIX systems into the ground when used the way IBM i was and is designed to be used. If you keep track of such things, you know that IBM's comparison benchmarks of i/5 to AIX, before they merged IBM i and AIX, showed that IBM i outperformed AIX when the benchmarks were heavily I/O bound. It performed worse then AIX where a lot of context switching was required. The IBM i kernel is slower for context switches, at least in part, because of security related overhead that is needed in a business environment, but not in a lot of other environments where AIX (or possably Linux or Solaris or Windows) would be the better choice.

Mike

P.S. If your customers don't like the green screen, use a secure web interface of your own design. The functionality is there.

P.S.S Definitely forward!

Lukas Beeler wrote:

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 17:04, Pat Barber <mboceanside@xxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm not sure you really understand what computers do for a living,
if you really believe what you just wrote.

Do a benchmark yourself. Compare the performance numbers.

Or start thinking about what i actually wrote. Stop with the fanboy
mindset, and approach this with a more scientific mindset. See what
performs better.

I did those benchmarks. Multiple times. And the numbers are very
clear. Even the more experienced members on this list will agree that
the base configuration of the Power 520's is a complete bullshit that
almost unusuable for most workloads. See the archives if you don't
believe me.