Re: Microsoft .NET frontending IBM i

Den 09/10/10 21.18, Nathan Andelin skrev:

From: Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen
How expensive is such a "capacity on demand"-upgrade, and what do you
do when you run out of these upgrades or they get too expensive?

Cost for COD? I don't have specific numbers. We added 5X capacity for 2X the
price of the original server; that was 4 years ago. The cost obviously depends
on the capacity of the server. Was that a rhetorical question? It appears to
me that the price/performance for Power 7 servers has dropped so significantly,
that Intel no longer has that advantage. The real advantage of centralizing
workloads under IBM i is that it takes less time for technical support. I
believe that time would be better utilized developing new systems with new
databases and user interfaces with best coding practices, that reduce
complexity. Disparate systems are too fragile and complex.

What happens after the COD is exhausted? I might turn that around and ask what
happens when an MS SQL server system can't keep up with loads driven by
application server farms? IBM i can now scale to 256 cores without
partitioning. What does Windows scale to without partitioning. IBM i also runs
under blades, if you really think a server farm has an advantage.

No, it is not a retorical question.

There is a point on any scalability curve where it gets _very_ expensive to grow the single machine you run on any further. The IBM i has a disadvantage in being expensive to begin with, so the pain point probably comes earlier.

I don't know where MS SQL came from. I didn't bring it up, and I don't think that people caring about scalability _and_ price necessarily want to pick MS SQL as the database.