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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.


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