Re: NT vs AS/400 -- MIDRANGE-L

Hi Nathan,


> This statement deserves qualification, John.  Does your company host it's
> database on one computer, and it's applications on another (or several
> others)?

Then I'll qualify it; we don't have a dedicated DB server or a dedicated
Application server. Our NT servers run a mixed workload (I've posted the
details on this list before). We can get away with this because we're not
servicing hundreds or thousands of users.


> Actually Microsoft recommends the same for Exchange and IIS too.  What is
> the reason?  Mostly stability.  Complex application environments tend to
> destablize Windows.  I still frequently hear my NT counterparts
recommending
> n-tier hardware as the best way to manage reliability in an Windows server
> environment.

Well, it's certainly the easiest way! :)

I know what the vendors recommend, but any vendor that insists on a
dedicated box for their application is shown the door. Of course, they'd all
*like* this to happen - even the AS/400 LIBL hogs, but when push comes to
shove they agree to support it either way.

> Consider this.  If you needed to deploy 50 different application servers
in
> a Windows environment, speaking of software components.  Would you divide
> them across multiple NT servers?  If the answer is yes, then you should be
> able to relate to the reliability and simplicity of an iSeries solution.
> Especially an ILE based solution.

My goal would be to minimize the number of servers required to do the job.
But it certainly wouldn't make me insist on iSeries, for a number of
reasons:

1) My NT servers *are* delivering reliability. I need to IPL my AS/400 just
as often (every few months) as NT; not because either one has had a failure,
but because of software patches.

2) AS/400 software is getting very hard to find, and 99% of what's out there
is not ILE anyway. In the last few years, I've been through this with a call
accounting package, a vehicle maintenance package, and a time-card package.
I wanted native 400 software, so that's where I started looking. I couldn't
find *any* call accounting packages, and there were only 3 or 4 in the other
two categories.

3) AS/400 software is absurdly overpriced. Is there really anyone on this
list whom needs me to cite examples?


Nathan, this is something that we're unlikely to agree upon because the
basis of the AS/400 argument is that it's the only stable computing platform
to run a business on. And my personal experience proves otherwise to me.

I do believe that it is the best platform available from a technical
perspective, and given my druthers, I'd like to see it take over the
computing world! But, and this is a BIG BUT, I'm not willing to pay $4000
for a $300 hard drive just because I like the platform.

We're right back to the good enough principal. NT/W2K and *nix are not as
robust as OS/400 - no one is disputing that. However, they only cost a
fraction of what IBM wants for their cash cow, so many companies are saying
"you know what, they're robust enough".

If you knock on my door with a web solution that's going to cost me $50K,
with a guarentee that it will run without requiring any attention for 5
years, and your competitor offers me OpenBSD/Apache for $5K but warns me
that I *might* have to reboot it once or twice a year, which do you think
I'm going to choose?

> We're getting mixed signals from IBM.  And I haven't been able to sort
this
> out.  IBM recently announced a 1070 CPW system with a base price of
$10,700.
> A new model 270 offers 15 - 20 times the performance of my 15 month old
> server for about the same cost.  This tends to confirm IBM's commitment to
> the small server market.  On the other hand, many new OS/400 features
apply
> primarily to mainframe class computers.  It makes people wonder where the
> iSeries is headed.

That 270 that you're talking about, when configured with 32GB of Non-RAID
DASD, 1GB of RAM, and a tape drive, costs almost $30K. And for that money, I
can't run my Win32 apps on it, or my 5250 (IA feature adds $77K), or
virtually any other non-AS/400 application out there that uses a database,
because DB2/400 is just different enough that most apps need porting. So
what I'm really looking at is a $30K webserver that runs proprietary CGI
programs through, guess what, the Apache server anyway (HTTP Classic is
history). You're going to have a tough sell in my company, Nathan, and I
happen to love the AS/400.


John Taylor
Canada



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