Re: Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch

[Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Anyway, on a 570, the cost to activate a single CPU, activate i5/OS
> for that CPU, and to add enough RAM so that single CPU can stay
> busy adds up to nearly 6 figures.  When you're talking about moving
> from a 2-way to essentially a 7-way (long-term) that is an awful lot
> of cash to spend even if you don't need a RAM bump with each
> activation.

Unfortunately, that's just the cost of the hardware and OS.  After the new 
hardware is installed, your vendor will probably want you to load multiple 
instances of Websphere, and to deploy their applications across each, in order 
to take advantage of the additional processors.

I downloaded a case study from IBM a few years ago where it took running about 
64 instances of Websphere to fully utilize a 32-way processor.  Websphere by 
itself was a bottleneck.  Managing distributed architectures is the real 
challenge.

> So while I don't doubt what you're saying at all, for us it
> (unfortunately) doesn't matter.  What matters is getting sufficient
> WebSphere App Server performance and reliability at the most
> reasonable cost.

I understand.  And I agree that going with a vendor supplied product is 
normally more cost effective than building your own.

Nathan.






 
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