RE: Anybody know the record for the longest an AS/400 has been contiuously up?

Mind blown, myths dispelled.

-----Original Message-----
From: John Jones [mailto:chianime@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, March 15, 2013 3:55 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Anybody know the record for the longest an AS/400 has been contiuously up?

Indeed.

If you think Windows isn't mature, consider Microsoft's Azure cloud.
Within 5 minutes you can have a provisioned server up & running using Windows Server, Linux, or any of a number of pre-built images that MS makes available.
Once running, that server is mirrored to a minimum of 3 disk arrays in the selected Microsoft data center. Each array will be in a different rack with a separate power feed. The image is also mirrored to at least one geographically dispersed data center (east-coast west-coast or similar if in the US).

This costs a few pennies for the user. Going from 1 to 4 cores per VM is done with a few clicks. Going from 2 to 16GB RAM takes a few clicks.
Adding disk takes a few clicks. Adding more VMs again takes just a few minutes each. Each increase only costs a few cents. BTW you can do a 90 day test drive free.

You have cheap, fast, scalable redundancy. None of which you have to buy & maintain hardware for. No OS costs either. SQL Server is readily available (not sure if there's an added cost). You can admin everything from your browser of choice. In that scenario, who the heck cares if you have 5 9s or 6 9s reliability? The service is so cheap you just run more than one in a cluster and let it load balance/fail over (clustering is included in the base cost structure as are infrastructure services like internal DNS, VLANs, etc.).


The smart IT professional isn't badmouthing Windows; they're learning how to exploit it for their employer (regardless of any preferred platform).


On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 2:11 PM, Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 3/15/2013 1:32 PM, Winchester Terry wrote:

Since the article was referring to uptime, I was referring to that
aspect of Windows. If you wish to tout the fantastic uptime of
Windows that's your perogative.

Let me try one more time. Not to convince, but to explain why this is
apples and oranges, and why it's more important to build IBM i up than
it is to tear Windows down. Windows is here, used by many more
millions than IBM i. The opinions of those people are important to us
in the midrange arena because those are the very people we serve.

That universe of people has business problems they want to solve.
They don't buy Windows PCs because of uptime considerations. They buy
Windows machines because they can do things that handle their business
needs. There isn't a business problem for which '3700+ days of uptime
on a single box' is the answer.

Taking the opportunity to rag on 'Windoze' because it doesn't stay up
for 3700+ days is unhelpful because it pits Windows against a standard
for which Windows isn't bothering to compete. It's like reading a
Windows forum complain that the AS/400 can't run his carefully crafted
.NET code. It isn't meant to.

These sorts of comparisons don't help us to do what we MUST do in
order to survive - convince management to spend money on midrange
servers and software, including programmers(!) in order to solve their
business problems better than any other hardware/software combination.
Because, like it or not, we ARE being compared to cheap, commodity
hardware and free/cheap open source software. By shrugging off
Windows, we are denying ourselves the opportunity to proactively solve
our end user needs - which by definition include doing things the way
the end user wants. Which clearly includes Windows desktops.

If you also choose to run your business with it...I wish you the
best of luck :)

That's like saying 'Good luck with that horseless carriage idea.'
Windows servers, which handle billions, if not trillions of email
messages, file server requests, print requests and web pages every
single day are already running the business.

However, as a desktop system, yeah it's "ok" but my next home PC
will be a fully loaded Mac...based on a more stable *NIX system.

Not IBM i, because IBM i isn't intended for that space. Windows on
commodity hardware isn't intended for the high availability (3700+
days of uptime) space, either. Which makes the unjust comparison an
excuse to bust on Redmond; something that happens a lot here. Think about it:
We're telling the rest of the organisation that the platform they've
chosen to run their web, email, print and file serving needs - Windows
- sucks. That their judgement is suspect. How does this help us try
to convince them to spend budget money on the midrange?

Of course, this forces me to bow down to another monopolistic
oriented company...but I digress...LOL

One could easily build a PC out of commodity parts and load an open
source OS like Linux or OpenBSD. Most people choose a commercial PC
with a commercial OS because of the convenience factor. This is an
important lesson for us in the midrange world. If we make things less
convenient for our end users, they will go elsewhere for their
computing needs.

--buck
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John Jones, CISSP
No security, no privacy. Know security, know privacy.
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