RE: Power7

Hi Nathan,

First pricing. Yeah, the list appears to be $6k - $7k. Then you add a tape
backup, more memory, and then the OS. The software from IBM is very
expensive. Then there is the maintenance and warranty costs per year -
windows updates are free, but with IBM, they cost $$$ as a tiered scale
based upon your licensing costs. With IBM, as your needs grow so does the
IBM revenue stream.

Until we started to delve into this beast, I thought the cost of an iSeries
was affordable as well. There are numerous hidden costs. Ever wonder why IBM
doesn't publish any of its software prices?

As for performance, all I can say is that I have done it. I have managed and
built web applications that hosted over 25k users with a single Windows
Server 2003 web server and SQL Server 2000. That was a job board and
distributed search engine that served content to a deep affiliate network.
Most of our queries were full-text index searches on job descriptions. Our
database had hundreds of thousands of jobs active in it.

If you really have 100k users hitting your app, then your bottleneck is
network and not CPU/memory. Most of your money will be spent getting fat
pipes into your farm and running gig-ethernet on every appliance, possibly
even fibre/infiniband on a backbone.

Published benchmarks are not very useful when building out a scaled network
environment. You need to understand how your users are accessing the
application, what average page load times are, average page sizes, and
partial page caches with caching reverse proxies. All of those aspects of
the application environment are well beyond the scope of a single iSeries.

As for talent, don't be fooled by the IBM party line. IBM "consultants" are
significantly more expensive than any other IT service provider. You can run
Windows on SUN hardware, so you don't need a Solaris admin. Setting up your
windows network is not hard at all and doesn't require expensive
consultants. You can get affordable help in that aspect of your setup, if
needed. As for SQL server administration, all I can say is that DB2, Oracle,
SQL Server, mySQL, they are all the same. If you don't know how to manage
any of them, then you need help, and ANY DBA worth buying is worth the
money.

DB2 is no easy "fire and forget" database. You need a DB2 sys admin just the
same as you need one for any other database.

-- Jake



-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Nathan Andelin
Sent: Monday, February 08, 2010 5:57 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Power7

From: Jacob Anderson
Just this configuration alone can handle 50,000 users on your web
application, provided that your app is written by professional ...

I'm also skeptical about your configuration supporting 50K users. Sun's
latest entry in the SAP SD benchmark processed 918 dialog steps (server
hits) per second, using an 8-CPU, 48-core server. That would only allow
each user an average of 1 hit each, every 55 seconds. And that was on a
server costing perhaps several hundred thousand dollars, with Oracle DB.

Nathan.