RE: iSeries Imaging (was: Help me Justify iSeries) -- MIDRANGE-L

Scott,

I'd be curious how his window server does at a million rows.  That's the
reason folks with larger table needs use Oracle on unix.  It can handle it
where windows craps out.  Which is one of the reasons why current
technologist see windows demand flattening out in 2008 and unix/oracle's
continueing to grow.  The MS database engine just sucks at large tables.

Don in DC

On Fri, 27 May 2005, Ingvaldson, Scott wrote:

> John -
>
> I think that you'll find that once your users drink the imaging tea they
> won't be able to stop.  We have run imaging on the iSeries for 10 years
> now.  Originally the retention was three years, then seven, now ten.
> Originally we kept 90 days worth of documents live on DASD, then 180
> days, now 5 years.  In our case that equates to about 13 million
> documents of which 6.5 million are live on Shark DASD fiber attached to
> the iSeries.  Our next big project is Enterprise Content Management.
>
> So add scalability to your iSeries justification, Ron.  How well will
> your Windows DB server scale past 10 million records?
>
> Regards,
>
> Scott Ingvaldson
> iSeries System Administrator
> GuideOne Insurance Group
>
> -----Original Message-----
> date: Fri, 27 May 2005 10:42:20 -0500
> from: "Jones, John \(US\)" <John.Jones@xxxxxxxxxx>
> subject: RE: Help me Justify iSeries
>
> Nevertheless, the drives should be considered as being engineered for
> less than 24x7 duty.  In a business computing environment, this should
> be considered an additional risk that can be mitigated by buying
> 'enterprise-class' storage; i.e. pretty much anything SCSI or a NAS/SAN.
> Some businesses may accept the risk; that's fine as long as the risk is
> understood.
>
>
> 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.
>
> For administration of the file server, there are a lot of components.
> We probably have to provide one for DR (double the hardware costs), it
> has to be backed up, it will have to be kept current on patches
> (probably), AV (definitely), etc.  Software licenses have to be procured
> and kept up to date.  You need a backup device, plan, media, software,
> etc.  There's the administrative overhead of tracking everything.  You
> have to provide rack, power/UPS, cooling, etc. for it.  For normal
> operation, there's not much in the way of troubleshooting performance
> issues, but there are plenty of tasks that have to be done, both
> one-time and ongoing.
>
> All of these things are already being done on the iSeries.  Add the
> disk, update your backup plan, and run with it.  Much easier & cheaper
> to set up and to administer.
>
> --
> John A. Jones, CISSP
> Americas Information Security Officer
> Jones Lang LaSalle, Inc.
>
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