Re: Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch

On 12/8/06, Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> From: Trevor Perry
>
> I expect that 4x faster is just a number you made up. And it was not
> considering apples to apples.

Trevor, you can try to fight this battle, but Steve really just brings up
the exact same argument.  He specifically ignores the concept of number of
users and TCO, and just hammers on the one-note song of "price/performance".

and the big fellas are jumping in the conversation ;)

Interestingly enough, even the reference he cites, which compares various
iSeries models with a "comparable" Dell, shows that the price per user for
the new iSeries models is far LOWER than the Dell.

ITJungle has been reporting lately that IBM is selling user capped
solution systems. no interactive and you have to buy a software
application from a participating solution vendor. It is not a true
comparison, but since IBM does not post the selling price for the i5
like it does the p5, it is the best we have to work with.

The $22000 p5 machine he's talking about is a little 4-processor machine
with two disk arms.  I don't know about you, but I've got a machine with
more than half that horsepower (dual 3.2 Xeons and 150GB of 15K disk) as my
workstation and I can bog it down all by myself.  I'd be interested to see
how many developers you can get going on the p5 he's talking about.  Whereas
I KNOW you can get a whole bunch of people working on an iSeries 520.

IBM does not post the TPM ratings of the i5 so we can only speculate.
Anyway, my question is more for IBM which of course cannot be answered
since they never participate in these forums. How is the underpowered,
over priced i5 going to make it thru 2007 without any improvements?

-Steve