RE: Windows on ibm power

We had the FSIOP, then we had the IXS. We had nine IXS' in one box. You
could do WRKNWSSTG and see the storage spaces used by the Windows servers.
What killed the IXS for us was that all nine of ours were not supported
on newer hardware so we moved them all to blade servers. We messed around
with iSCSI but that was in it's infancy and we dropped that and just use
NetApp for the disk on the blade servers. Nowadays you do not even need
the special iSCSI card - it can be done over typical lan ports. But we
never tried that. All of our IXS and iSCSI cards were shipped back to our
BP with a "give us fair credit for them" arrangement. Getting rid of IXS
actually freed up two racks and significantly reduced power consumption.
Another reason to stick with blades instead.

We never tried IXA. That was an adapter which allowed the disk on the i
to be used by a standalone Windows box. The benefit being that the
standalone box could be upgraded more frequently, have extra cards added
and what not that an embedded card could not.

The benefit of the IXS was that the cards were part of standard
maintenance on the i while you pay extra for maintenance on the IXA box,
blade centers, etc.

Read a magazine article about a shop in Florida that when it's threatened
with a hurricane unplugs their rackmounted i, with it's several IXS cards
and ships it well inland and north. In my mind, if you have the space for
the extra card cages to hold the IXS cards (which took multiple slots)
then you have the space to throw in a blade center in the rack.

If you performed some serious data transfers between your windows server
and your i then an IXS card runs at bus speed.

Windows file serving from an IXS card in the same i, using the same disk
drives, will blow the doors off of NetServer file shares.

And, hey, how many windows servers do you know that had 90 disk arms like
our IXS cards sharing the disk with the i had?

Rob Berendt