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And here's one you cannot do from home with a SAN: Reboot the server. Oh sure you could get one of those fancy TCP/IP enabled power strips and turn off the power to the thing but who's gonna push the power on button? OK Yes you can configure the BIOS to restart after power is restored but ya gotta sure remember to do that. Or you could add the RSA card and access the web interface of that (remembering the user id and password of course) and power it down and up from there. Or you could load IBM Director on a system and use that as your tool. But with System i you just vary off the *NWSD and vary it back on. Don't get no easier than that.
You say you can add disk 'on the fly' to a windoze machine without a SAN. I've yet to see that work well. Either the new disk isnt' RAID protected or you gotta stop and start RAID to get it protected or you gotta mirror the new disks. In any case you're stuck only with increments of the drive size. Need 30GB Quick but you're using 140GB Drives? Sorry gotta ad 140GB and wait for RAID to build etc. On i adding 30GB is just minutes. Adding 5 or 10GB could be only 1 or 2. And it's ALREADY protected.
You can also reach into QNTC into the file system of an integrated server and back that stuff up with the SAV command. Can't do that with external windoze of any sort.
You can use the tape drives and CD/DVD drives INCLUDING Image Catalogs of the system i with integrated servers. Can't do that with external windoze of any sort.
You can do SAVE 21. Take that sucker to a DR Site, restore it to the system there and you got 100% of everything. From SLIC to user apps on the i, continuing right through the windoze kernel, the registry, it's users, apps and data. Can't do that with an external SAN.
Sure there are a few things the SAN can do that System i integration can't (yet) but new stuff shows up in every release. Rumor has it that san-like Flash copy is coming in V5R5.
I've not seen reason to include yet another piece of hardware to purchase, license, learn, maintain, power, cool, and expand when i does it all already. Does that mean there is no place for SANs? Don't be silly of course there are but the majority of small and medium shops simply don't need the hassle.
- Larry Walden H. Leverich wrote:
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.I've got to disagree here (no surprise). But I've yet to see something you can do in IXS that you can't do on "external" windows boxes with a SAN. I can re-target LUNs and reboot a machine on different hardware, I can add disk on the fly (actually don't even need a san for that), and I can clone the disk image at the san to create the test server w/out aproblem.The IXS is nothing more than a windows box with a san. Granted, it's all "integrated", but it's just a san. -Walden
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