RE: AS/400 - iSeries uptime statistics

> From: PaulMmn
> 
> I was mainly concerned with the myth (!?)(don't yell!) that Windoze
> servers are less stable than the iSeries.  With the $5K servers,
> we've had very few instances of our servers ending abnormally.  And,
> after an incident a couple of weeks ago when our production iSeries
> decided to head South...  well, I can't speak about reliability of
> hardware at work anymore.   ):

Now wait a second here, Paul.  Listen to yourself!  Your Windows boxes
crash so often that you speak of multiple crashes as "very few
instances".  Your iSeries crashes once, which is so rare an occasion
that it changes your thinking of the machine.  You haven't even told us
what "head South" means, but somehow one crash is worse than multiple.
This sounds suspiciously like drinking the MS KoolAid to me, but hey,
I'm just an iSeries bigot.


> I also feel that we on the iSeries have a bunch of subsystems under
> one roof.  The Windoze side has multiple subsystems, each running on
> its own piece of hardware.  Yes, the single roof makes sharing
> resources between subsystems easier.  When we restart a subsystem (if
> we need to), the Windoze side reboots the entire piece of hardware.

I haven't restarted a subsystem on my machine in months.  I only IPL
when I need to apply a PTF.  I once locked up an early release of
WebSphere badly enough that I needed to do a RCLSTG *DBXREF.  I crashed
a S/38 by running a CL program with zero lines (after compiling it with
IGNORE_SEVERITY 99).

I have seen Windows machines lose their registry settings, quit
recognizing hardware, lock up, blue screen, destroy their own disks,
magically lose icons and fonts, slow down to the point of uselessness,
and many other issues.  Invariably the only solution is to reboot, and
when that fails, reinstall from scratch.

Joe