Re: Lower End AS/400s

[James Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 17 Dec 2002, Chris Devous wrote:

> I think that the 400's incredible stability is due, at least in part, to
> the tight integration between the hardware and the operating system.
> This provides a degree of fault tolerance and management that is, in my
> opinion, technically unequaled on any comparable platform (including
> *nix).

I don't disagree that the hardware/software integration adds to
the AS/400's excellent stability.  But the AS/400 is not the only platform
to do so.  I'm sure everyone already knows this, but it warrants mention
anyway.  Other platforms have a strict set of hardware and gain the same
advantages as the AS/400, so this isn't really an advantage for AS/400
over other platforms.  For example, IRIX achieves excellent stability with
truly massive I/O because it knows that the underlying hardware will
always have certain specs.  Other platforms like OS/390 and Sun take
similar advantages.

Where the hardware/software integration does have an advantage is over
PCs.  Since the OS (whether Win*, linux, *bsd) can't be gauranteed that it
will always be running on the same hardware it can't be optimized for the
machine.  And crappy hardware can be placed in the machine that may its
own stability problems.  That's why I fell good to get an uptime of 50
days on one of my machines because it has a crappy SCSI card/cable/disk
that keeps failing at random times (not important enough for me to
actually fix it).

James Rich