Re: Windows Integration and Longhorn

[Larry Bolhuis <lbolhuis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Lukas,

 In your situation the price didn't make sense but that's clearly not 
always the case. Many shops already have open slots an IXS card would 
fit into so they don't take the 'expansion tower' hit you would have had 
to.  In addition due to arm requirements many shops have extra disk 
storage available so they don't incur any cost there. 
- I noted in your example you didn't include the cost of 24x7 
maintenance for your x346. To be fair in the comparison that's required 
since IXS cards are covered by the i maintenance 24x7 at no additional 
charge.
- IXS also benefit from redundant power and cooling of the i so you may 
have had to kick in another power supply for your x346 as well.
- There is no tape drive listed for your  x346 so you'll need to add 
that into the price (TWICE) too, IXS can use tape already in your i. 
You'll also need media, procedures to change tapes nightly, on-site and 
off-site storage space. So why the tape drive price twice? Because PC 
tape solutions change SO FAST that by the time a data center disaster 
occurs requiring you to use your off-site backups you will only be able 
to find the drive on ebay. So you buy two and keep one with your 
off-site tapes or you may never be able to read them.
- Your windoze requirement included a fair amount of disk but will only 
6 arms be enough? Often they will work fine but I've seen more than a 
few pc servers purchased with just a few huge disks where the disks end 
up being an I/O bottleneck.
- Can you reboot the x346 from home when it locks up? You can with IXS 
so long as your i is running. Vary it off, vary it on. Very Very nice.

Of course the real and true strength of Windoze (and now Linux) 
integration is when you get to two, three and more servers. You gotta 
love the ability to swap to a spare server in 10 seconds plus Windoze 
reboot time. Can't do that with the external solution. Ability to add 
disk on the fly at any time. Can't do that external. Ability to 'clone' 
the disk images to make a test server. Can't do that with external.  And 
of course as we wander into storm season here in the northern 
hemisphere, wouldn't you sleep better knowing that 100% of your data 
center is contained on that  SAVE 21 tape i.e. 'Restore once, recover all'?

Note that I'm not saying you would have ended up with IXS in your shop 
but as often happens things get overlooked that nearly always favor the 
external solution.  You also could have considered the IXA attachment 
since you had not space for the IXS card but being short of disk that 
still wouldn't have worked out well for you I don't think.

 On i we now lean toward iSCSI attachment. This SIGNIFICANTLY reduces 
the cost.factors and makes adding servers much easier. It also opens up 
1U 'pizza box' form factor servers for integration. IBM IS working hard 
on integration but unfortunately *WAY* too many IT shops have an 
artificial 'wall' between the WinDOHs folks and the i side of the house 
which precludes even a discussion of integration.

 True story: My sales lady and I spoke to a room full of folks at a 
customer site some years back. They had an iSeries 270 that was bing 
upgraded at the time to an i810. They also had four racks full of old 
300Mhz Compaq servers. These things were huge, underpowered, out of disk 
and they were failing a tape drive or more every week. Maintenance was 
killing them and the data center was packed.  We pitched integration to 
them. It started slow but by the end of the two hours it appeared that 
every person in the room was thrilled. The questions kept coming and the 
answers evoked smiles even a couple shouts. We thought a sale would 
certainly follow. We missed one guy, the boss. After we left he spent a 
half hour screaming at our sponsor. "Why in the world would any company 
spend even a dime betting their future on an antique worn out has-been 
architecture like the S/38. I should fire you just for this waste of 
time." (etc etc.)   This guy was about 60 so you'd think he would have 
known better. In actuality he had a friend who sold HP.......  Politics 
trumps technology every time.

 - Larry

Lukas Beeler wrote:
> That's because you can't pay for it.
> About 1.5 years ago, we thought about modernizing our Windows
> infrastructure. Of course, integrated xSeries came to mind. However, it
> just wasn't feasible. We needed about 450GB of storage, and 4GB of RAM
>
> We could buy an IBM xSeries 346, Rack Mount, 2 HE, 6x 147GB. Cost = 8k
> CHF
>
> Or we could buy an integrated xSeries, an expansion tower for additional
> disks, hugely expensive 70GB Disks (no 147GB disks available for our
> machine). Cost = 25k CHF
>
> IXS = overpriced.
>