Re: "State of the Midrange" by Don Rima

Read this,   This is a typical exchange between an AS/400 person in an
AS/400 shop and the person who is in charge of PC's and PC Servers.

The AS/400 person sends this story to the PC person.

----------------
LEAD STORY
"AS/400 users get a Windows boost"
IBM is expected to announce its plans for rolling out
products and applications to help AS/400 users interested
in running Windows NT/2000 applications on their boxes. The
move will allow users to run Windows-based applications not
available for the AS/400 platform without forsaking their
AS/400 investment or hiring Windows-trained personnel.

SOURCE: Network World Fusion
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2000/0811ibmas.html

--------------------------------------

And this is the reponse back from the head of the PC area.

----------------------------

Thanks for the update,   If you read the article carefully you'll note that
you're still running a copy of Windows NT/2000 on either the internal INS
(yep, its the same old PCI single board computer as before...) or on the
external INS (just the plain old PC server with a high speed
connection...).  So how does this eliminate the need for someone trained on
Windows NT/2000 support, do you suppose?  Interesting premise.

I guess IBM is seeing an increasing demand for support for the Microsoft
platforms if they continue to devote resources to Windows.  I wonder at
what point an IBM customer starts comparing the performance and reliability
of an external PC server using the AS/400 as a big disk drive to the
performance and reliability of an external PC server using only its own
disk storage?  Wonder how the costs compare?  Wonder how the increase in
new Windows NT/2000 server installations compares to the increase in the
number of AS/400 "server" installations?

Keep sending me these when you see them.  I appreciate the perspective from
a more tradtional IBM viewpoint as it helps me keep things in perspective,
too.




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