I haven't run all the numbers, but at the same time, $4K for an unlimited
server isn't a bad number. At that point you're using the machine for both
a development machine and a production machine.
Maybe it is just my experience, but it is a small minority of shops that
have a single machine/lpar to do all their dev/qa/prod software cycling.
Not saying you couldn't make due with a single machine/lpar.
Then people say "heck, I can get one heck of a nice Lintel/Wintel server
for $5k!".
Why is $13K a roadblock for SMBs? Have you configured and priced a fully
redundant Wintel server? And are you going to be using the same machine for
development, testing and production? You can with an i, but I've found it
to be a lot harder with Windows, especially since development machines tend
to crash.
Hold on there. Notice I put that sentence in quotes to declare it was
*somebody* saying it, and not necessarily me.
But since you challenged it we can talk about it :-) I think buying
hardware and hosting it on your network will become a thing of the past for
most SMB's. For example, the company I work for used to host our own
Wintel/Lintel servers but we now "rent" a couple from a data center for (I
believe) $550/month/server - www.hostmysite.com. The cool thing is that we
also get direct phone access to second level support personnel and they
fully support/manage the vast majority of all applications running on each
server (i.e. MySQL, MSSQL, Windows Server OS, Tomcat, PHP, Apache,
ColdFusion). That means they take care of maintaining all of those software
packages including upgrades/patches and what not (which can be a fulltime
job in and of itself).
If you're running a pure Java application, you don't need an i.
This is exactly what I was getting at, so I think we are on the same page.
I am more basing my thoughts on where I believe IBM is taking the machine
and development tools.
On this next point we might differ: If you ask me, IBM intends to make
RDi-SOA a stepping stone to a 100% Java/EGL/JSF/xyzDB application stack. I
will qualify that statement to say I know not ALL IBMer's have the same
intentions, but it is obvious to me that the ones making the decisions have
that intention. Would you agree?
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
midrange.com
