Hi Nathan
On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 4:00 PM, Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From: Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen
How expensive is such a "capacity on demand"-upgrade ...
Just looked at pricing for an entry level model 720 (4-core). Hardware starts
at about $7K. On to of that, IBM i is licensed (and capped) by core. Release
7.1 workload capping restricts processing to one or more cores. The IBM i
price/core is $2,245. So you might begin with a $10-15K box with 1 active core,
memory, disk. Later you might activate up to 3 additional cores in increments.
Each increment would add approximately 5,950 CPW and cost $2,245.
It's far more complex than just "cores". Your assumption here (just
for starters) is that the two ethernet ports on the base box can
handle all the required ethernet traffic - as well as providing the
required network redundancy - and also that all disks fit into the
base unit.
I'd expect a lot of disk on a machine with 16 cores - and using
iSeries disk is hugely expensive. Organising downtime for patches and
backup is also expensive unless you arrange for redundancy - also a
pretty expensive proposition. The knowedge and software to implement
this (i.e. HA) on the iSeries can also be terribly expensive.
It makes more sense to think of the servers in a server farm or
virtualized machines in a network as isolated subsystems rather than
as huge a huge number of pc's sitting round in racks or on the floor.
An 8 or 16 way intel server with a decent san using virtualization for
the various windows server roles is a pretty handy competitor to a
well spec'd iseries box on every level, particularly once you start
considering 24X7 with redundant disk.
Throw into the mix that your paying commodity prices for the people,
the hardware and the software and it can be a hard package to beat as
the market is telling us all, like it or not.
If you want to compare an iSeries configuration to a "server farm" you
are going to have to be far more rigorous about the hardware, the
costings, the database and the kind of website that is being served
than what I have seen so far in this thread.
It's simplistic to dismiss the server farm as being "too complex"
without defining or understanding what that is bringing to the table.
midrange.com
