RE: Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch

["Lukas Beeler" <l.beeler@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Your problem is the two mirrored disk drives, so you basically really 
> only have a single drive system as far as performance goes.  
> In other words, typical crap PC disk performance. ;-)

A PC server with a single RAID1 of two disks isn't a rocket - but it's
still faster than a minimal 520.

> We NEVER recommend a 2 disk mirrored system (although once in a 
> while a customer will go for it).  We always recommend a 
> minimum 4 drive RAID solution - and usually a minimum 2GB memory.

The problem is that our customers won't buy anything at that level.

Here's IBMs list of "Small customers" system:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/i/hardware/520express/specifications.html

The Entry machine is the only machine which is still kinda sellable in
todays market (at about 20k, all costs included). The Entry Plus
machine, with a MES for +1GB RAM, +1 PSU, is at about 30k - and that
doesn't include the cost for the bigger tape drive needed, because at
72GB Disk capacity, the standard SLR60 is not enough - and then you have
choice between a crappy VXA tape drive, or the LTO3 tapedrive which
costs 7k - that's 4k more than Tandberg or HP LTO3, and you will STILL
have to pay for the SLR60 drive.

> F11 a couple of times, change all from *FIXED to *CALC - you can;t
change the *MACHINE pool).
> Do you have automatic performance adjustment turned on (system value
QPFRADJ set to 2 or 3) ?

I'm aware of these recommendations. They don't help much, though.