Re: Power7 -- MIDRANGE-L

OK I'm not going to dissect this entire thread but a few points need to be made.

1) If you build a windoze server with only two huge drives mirrored and no cache, or a Linux server, or an AIX server and expect it to do lots of I/O it won't. That's just facts. Perhaps on the very low end you can build a small PC server that doesn't do I/O and it will run fine but after IPL the small i runs fine too if you don't ask it to do lots of I/O.

2) IBM Publishes it's software prices. It's on every configuration too. I don't know where you got the idea that IBM doesn't publish it's pricing.

3) DB2 Admin, Really? I support many customers from that two drive 8203 up to SAP on 30+ Partitions across 40 CPUS. I'm not aware of one single DB/2 admin at any of my customers period. On the other hand nearly every sizable SQL Server or Oracle shop I'm aware of has a team of them.

4) Finally IBM i on Power Systems repeatedly wins TCO studies over and over in scenario after scenario. Would they win every conceivable comparison? Of course not but it's too easy to say "Just grab this and that and another thing and it will do everything i does but cheaper." That is pure and simple hogwash.

5) IBM Consultants. Not defending them. Period.

- DrFranken

On 2/9/2010 1:30 AM, Jacob Anderson wrote:

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