RE: Help me Justify iSeries

John, you have a situation that perfectly matches what is needed.
Maybe.  You have a 35GB RAID set with a slot open, and that extra drive
will exactly hold your data.  For anyone else, this would be a more
costly endeavor.  And if your estimates are wrong, it will be more
costly for you, too... at least double the cost, as you have to add
another drive, and perhaps even more if you have to add another RAID
set.

You're also scaling up the costs for the PC.  For example, I'm not sure
why you need a $1000 rackmount server for a single network device.  For
$1000 I can get a 1.0TB RAID5 NAS with all the expansion I'll ever need.

Anyway, it's a business decision.  In your case, you can justify the
iSeries disk.  For others, the high cost of iSeries disk is an
impediment to the purchase or maintenance of their iSeries, and so I'm
pointing out an alternative.  It's not meant to challenge your decision,
merely to make it clear that not everybody's situation is the same as
yours.

Not to mention, as Rob points out, that the IFS sucks as a file server.
<G>

Joe



> From: Jones, John (US)
> 
> I originally mentioned the 100K documents/year.  The average size is
> supposedly going to be 100-150K so we're talking 10-15GB/year (+ file
> system overhead).  Retention rquirements haven't been ironed out yet
but
> I imagine we'll only keep at most 3 years of images live and archive
> anything older.  So a single 35GB drive will likely suffice.  The
> incremental cost to grow a RAID set by 1 drive is not bad.  Compare
that
> to a single-CPU (Celeron, no less) 1-U minimal Dell PowerEdge 750 (the
> cheapest rackmount server they have) and you'll see the costs are not
> far apart.  The additional drive for the iSeries is actually cheaper
> when you factor in an OS for the server (if non-Linux), HW
maintenance,
> etc.  And that's raw hardware alone.