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Joe Pluta wrote:
Joe, (first to pick on you :-) I disagree wholeheartedly! This is one of the core tenets of the System i family from it's heritage way back in S/3x land to the present day! The box IS Simplicity. It IS Power. It IS Integrated. It can have looks if it's done right. WE have the best box on the planet to work with but guess what, so does Rochester! To say they can't do it is silly. They built the box, they can extend it.So to expect the iSeries to somehow build simplicity AND power AND looks into a single user interface architecture is asking a bit much. Joe
My company does mostly System i work. Most of our revenue is from developers working on the platform. Most of that work and virtually 100% of the new work is developing applications for the web. Applications that run completely on the System i except for the presentation layer which is in the browser. Are our web tools awesome at this point? I don't think so but they DO work! And since they are built on the best business platform out there they work over and over and over.
So why is 'i' sliding backwards? A big part of that is US. Trevor has posted at least twice in this thread :-) and made that point very clearly. I completely agree but I think modified tactics needs to be employed in our data centers. When the CIO, IT Manager, Lead Developer, or whoever says: "We need to swtich to Wintel" go on the Offense for OUR platform. Make them probe that their solution is better than ours. Make them show the true cost of ownership of their choice. When they say things like "I didn't even know we had a System i (iSeries (AS/400 (S/38))) ask them what brand of air compressors are out in the shop. Bet they dont' know unless the thing has recently blown up costing big downtime. Ask them what brand of most things they have out there and I'll bet the only ones they know are the brand new ones or mostly the ones causing trouble. MAKE THAT POINT!
ASK QUESTIONS:1) "So what anti-virus solution will you be employing and how much will that cost in dollars and system performance? You know we don't require any of that on System i. That's a cost you are adding to the system.
2) "What backup solution are you going to use for the servers? Will it back everything up at once to create an intelligent checkpoint or are the backups going to be just a pile of tapes? How will you put it back together in a disaster?" Show them how System i backup and recovery works, explain the process of rebuilding an i from IPLing a SAVE 21 or SAVSYS tape to full operation. EVERY Windows administrator I have spoken with is amazed by this capability. Sit and smile as they explain how they must reload the O/S to the new box. Update the O/S to current levels. Install the backup software. Configure the tape drive. Restore the tape catalogs. And finally restore the security, programs and data to the system. There is virtually NO chance that what they put back together is identical to what they had. Point that out.
3) "How many will we need? Sure each one is cheaper and they sound great up front until we realize that one becomes two becomes four becomes eight and so on!" They WILL multiply it is INEVITABLE. Every windoze software vendor says: "You'll need a dedicated server for our application or we may not be able to support it." Show them statistics of how many sysops they will need. How much time will be spent loading patches and updates. How much time will be lost to re-boots to apply them. Point out the size of current staff and how efficient maintaining the i is.
4) "What is the maintenance plan?" What is the cost of 24x7 maintenance for all those systems? Is it even available? What are the response times? Which components can be replaced on the fly and are they even redundant at all? Do they have any idea who the maintenance guys are? Do they even exist or are the servers sent in for repair or repaired by your staff adding yet another burden.
5) "What are the power, space, and HVAC loads all those servers will require?" Where will all that come from? How about storage? Will they go with internal disk (and find out that every server ends up either 10% or 90% full but never between there) or will they add a SAN. Not cheap that and it's another technology to manage and maintain and a single point of failure so don't get a cheap one! Can a RAID set be rebuilt while the system is up or is downtime required? Can a RAID set be expanded when it's full or must the set be rebuilt requiring a data reload?
OVER and OVER we see system rooms with piles upon piles of Wintel and even Lintel servers. The room has been expanded, power expanded, HVAC upgraded, more switches added, more bandwidth dozens of tape drives etc all around the place. More blinking LEDs than a North Jersey house at Christmas but the CORE APPLICATION is running on 'that black thing in the corner.' It hasn't gotten a new O/S in 5 years or a PTF in 7. It's had one maintenance call for a failed drive, and it gets a tape fed in once a day and a cleaning tape once a month. Nobody does anything with it BECAUSE THEY DON'T NEED TO! Yet the staff grows and costs escalate just to maintain the peripheral systems!
Look, we need IBM's help but they need us more. If we are waiting for IBM to advertise and push the system out there we are history. WE KNOW the system is better. WE KNOW the system is cheaper to run, easier to maintain, more reliable and better in every way. WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND IT IS US! Get involved at COMMON, iSociety, here on Midrange-L, your local LUG, other boards, blogs etc but First AND FOREMOST get involved In Your Own SHOP! BE the evangelist there. Be the champion of System i, and ask for help if you need it. We're behind you 100%
- Larry
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