Re: AIX - i5/OS feature comparison was the notorious Steve's soapbox

There is a side to this that has not been considered yet. And that is
the number of OS licenses a shop purchases after making the choice of
which one. In my part of the world just about every iSeries shop I know
has one iSeries that runs many applications. Maybe a second smaller one
for development but most I know are like us, they develop and test on
the same system as production work runs on. Of those shops that I know
run AIX they usually have multiple RS/6000s for production and multiple
test systems. We have only one app that runs on AIX and yet that team
says they can't function if they don't have at least 2 systems and they
have asked for 3. When you move to Windows it gets even worse. Every app
needs two servers as they insist on clustering everything, there are 3
just for doing directory work, 2 for DNS, 3 web servers, 3 SQL servers
(and we don't even have one database with more than 5,000 records in it
on SQL), 2 portal servers, and the list goes on. The more of something
you sell the lower the cost per unit.

stephenrichter@xxxxxxxxx 9/8/2006 8:54:49 AM >>>

On 9/8/06, Evan Harris <spanner@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Steve

I wasn't trying to say these things couldn't be done (which it what
it seems you are assuming), I'm just trying to point out how much
more effort is involved  that's the whole point of the discussion.

Starting a job at a particular time is no great trick (even Windows
can do this) - as you point out cron does the job, but making jobs
run in series and preventing clashes is much harder. It was the
queueing and management aspect I was really getting at. I am of
course ignoring the fact that the cron interface is highly
unintuitive compared to the friendly iseries job scheduler.

I've seen the back end of printer queues used for batch work before,
but it requires extra scripting and coding; hardly as simple and
elegant as a jobqueue and nowhere near as manageable or

configurable.

if you want to move an already "submitted" job then it is a major
pain. of course, the fact that your guys had to set this up merely
proves my point; every iseries has queued batch processing set up

out

of the box - you don't have to do anything.

I don't see how being able to see CPU is has any bearing on the
points I made. Theres another command (topas from memory) that also
let's you see this stuff in a "poor relative" version of WRKACTJOB,
but knowing the CPU use doesn't help you much when two jobs can't
decide which of them has exclusive use of the CPU and memory.
Separating jobs is not simple under unix, but is a piece of cake on
the iseries. Again, you have this ability right out of the box,
without doing anything.

The point is not whether these things can be done or not, it's the
degree of effort and sophistication required to accomplish them.
getting this ability out of the box is the point of the discussion
not whether it can be done or not.

Anyway, you can accept it or not; until you really understand what

it

takes to manage a system (unix and/or iseries) day in day out,

easily

and efficiently and what actually has to be done from day one to set
them up I doubt we are going to get anywhere.

Evan,

Your killing me. why me!?  I have no problem accepting that i5/OS has
superior work managment tools than Linux.  I am doubtful that there
are no job queue add ons for Linux, but I asked the question and you
said no so I will accept that. My point is neither i5/OS or Linux are
superior to the other. ( Windows with the built in managed code .NET
framework, that is a different story! )  i5/OS has great job
management capabilities. AIX gets 50% more transactions per minute per
unit of power5+ CPU than its counterpart.  i5/OS has database and
security built in. AIX is able to run more than one brand of database
at the same time. The p5 is a great web server that can scale to
millions of TPM. The i5 can run functional green screen applications
with a minimum of intervention.  i5/OS is not worth more than AIX.
They should be sold at the same price.

-Steve