RE: The Perpetual Myth of iSeries Obsolescence

Thanks Joe :)

I would most certainly agree that the comparison of per cycle cost of a i 
series versus wintel is significantly higher on a purchase price basis.  

I did a cost comparison about a year ago for a 520 that if you want, I will 
send it to you, I would need to remove some proprietary information first.

We compared the purchase price, support costs and ongoing maintenance costs 
and suprisingly the 520 over a 3 year period was approximately $3,000 less 
than a comparable Dell.

Douglas


On Wed, 3 May 2006 09:26:36 -0500, Joe Pluta wrote
> > From: Douglas W. Palme
> > 
> > Joe,
> > Correct me if I am wrong here but those "expensive CPU cycles" you are
> > referring to operate on the batch side, so the cost as far as interactive
> > is concerned is not as heavy.
> 
> Absolutely, Douglas!  Coupled with the decreasing price of the 
> platform, it's certainly not as burdensome a cost.  But even with 
> that taken into account, the price per cycle of our beloved System i 
> is much higher than the equivalent cycle on a *nix or <shudder> 
> Wintel box.  I'd hazard a guess that it's at least ten times as much.
> 
> > I agree there are hidden costs that need to be evaluated including what 
is
> > the best platform for the situation and not all platforms are applicable
> > in all circumstances.
> 
> Absolutely.  And for the same reason no one technology is applicable 
> in all circumstances.
> 
> > Certainly no one size fits all methodology here.
> 
> Again I agree.  The folks that avoided the lemming-like charge to Unix/SQL
> in the 90s or the equivalent stampede to EJB and Struts in the first 
> part of this decade are the ones who still have the money to use the 
> more mature technologies.  (Note that these folks will likely NOT be 
> rushing headlong to rewrite everything in AJAX, either.)
> 
> At the same time, it certainly helps to have a baseline to compare against.
> In the midrange, we have 5250 as a baseline to compare UI 
> performance.  It's not a perfect baseline especially as interfaces 
> become more interactive, but it's one our users certainly understand.
> 
> And for web application architecture, I think JSP Model II is a 
> pretty solid baseline.  There's really nothing you can't do with it, 
> and it's widely available on most platforms.  So it seems reasonable 
> to use it as a baseline to compare things like skills required and 
> development costs and licensing requirements and flexibility of deployment.
> 
> Joe
> 
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