RE: Help me Justify iSeries

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Just from a cost-benefit basis.  I know some people paint me as an
iSeries or nothing kind of guy, but the truth is that there are things
that cheap disk on a Lintel/Wintel box is good for, and one is for
storing relatively static binary data.  It's a business decision:

Take a 17.5GB drive on the iSeries.  Last I checked, that costs about
$1400 or $80/GB.  If you are storing a million 100K files, then you're
looking at 100GB, or upwards of $8000 in storage costs.  I just built a
Wintel box for my wife with 160GB for under $500.  Or you can get a
network drive.  The Western Digital 320GB network drive with auto-backup
is $300.  The only thing you need a PC for is basically to map the
drive.

The justification (in my mind, anyway) for the high cost of iSeries disk
is the fact that the box has lots of arms to get the data and lots of
IOPs to help process it.  That's really important when you're dealing
with millions of records (and billions of little fields).

This is lost on binary large objects.  Since you typically read the data
in a single lump, disk latency is not an issue, and so the large number
of drives, arms and IOPs doesn't really help.  Unless you have a ton of
users pulling up documents at the same time, pointing them at a PC to
get the image won't hurt.  The only time it would make sense to have
that sort of data on the IFS is if you for some reason need to actually
massage the data on the iSeries.

Does that make sense to everyone, or am I missing something?

Joe


> From: Douglas W. Palme
> 
> "I highly recommend NOT storing large binary data such as scanned
> documents and images on your iSeries."
> 
> What are you reasons for this recomendation Joe? Not disagreeing, just
> interested in your justification.....