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  3. August 1999

NT on AS400 or standalone PC?

Title:
ONE MAN's OPINION
 
The AS/400 is not the pick if you are basing the decision solely on the price of hardware. We're more expensive in that comparison..period. I know there some IBMers out there who might debate me on this but it's true. Add up the cost of the IPCS with appropriate memory and the cost of our DASD and you'll find the stand alone server to be less expensive. 
Problem is that the stand alone server will be less reliable too! Is there a dollar value for reliability? What's the dollar value for remote administration? You can "vary on" or "boot" the IPCS remotely.  Can you do that natively with the stand alone NT box? What about a backup strategy? Are you comfortable with native NT backup? We know that the AS/400 has more tape drive alternatives and that all of them are faster than those found on PC servers...and more reliable too.
But what's the value for backup and reliability?   Is there any value of having multiple IPCS cards in one machine? I know of a shop with 10 and another who just installed 4 in one AS/400 and 2 in another.
Managing multiple NT instances in one AS/400 may have value...but what dollar amount do we put on this?  Or how about having 2 IPCS cards with one for failover? One card crashes and I re associate my NT image with another card and "vary on".  Does that have value?  Does having superior RAID-5 or Mirroring protection have value? Does having the NT instance scatter loaded automatically across drives have value? It should, particularly in I/O intensive applications. 
The AS/400 vs. stand alone server decision is not an easy one.  Sometimes it is good to go the server route. But to be honest, I lead with the AS/400 approach first and then try to provide arguments to eliminate that solution. Most of the time the AS/400 prevails, but there are occasions when NT on NetFinity makes more sense.
 
Hope this helps. 

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