RE: The Perpetual Myth of iSeries Obsolescence

> From: Douglas W. Palme
> 
> 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.

First, please feel free to send that to me.

Second, I'm not sure we're comparing apples to apples here.  For a pure
web-serving machine, I would have a hard time spending over $3500.  And
that's for the good stuff, not Dell.  I know, I've got a dual 3.2GHz xSeries
with 80GB of 15K RAID5 storage and 2GB of RAM.

Now, I realize you get a lot more with a System i (I'm sure you know I'm a
big proponent of TCO comparisons), but for the purposes of this discussion,
I don't NEED any of that.  I just need Linux or FreeBSD and Apache, and I
guarantee you won't be able to match the performance of my little server
with any 520 configuration, and certainly not one priced comparably.

For low-end single-purpose servers, the System i still has a much higher
price per cycle.

Joe