Re: Why IBMi research effort

Mark,

What seems to be missing through the thread here is how few servers you need when running POWER especially with IBM i. Applications integrate so much more easily when running on the same platform than when there is a little here and a little there. Recently one of my customers was told by a vendor that a piece of their application which formerly ran right next to their primary LOB application was now going to be running on two windows servers and an AIX server. It would now need to extract data from their LOB app, move mash process manipulate exchange convert translate and finally return it to the LOB app in the form where it could be imported. The argument was that those three additional pieces were each 'Best of Breed' and had been integrated to provide the best possible solution. Even assuming that's a true statement how much better is it than the previous solution and how much money will that either save for the customer or how much additional sales will it enable? Will it pay for the three servers? Three operating system licenses? A copy of Oracle? Far more complicated backups? Increased power and cooling required? And the 800 lb gorilla, managing and troubleshooting of this far more complicated solution. Tightly integrated the original application was just 'there' and worked. Now when something doesn't work it's hunting around for what's broken, what server has an error, low disk space, a service that didn't start, a thousand things. Worse neither of the two new operating systems were ones the customer had skills with so even more cost is incurred for those skills.

The point here being cost of the box is just a fraction of the cost of a solution. You focus on that because YOU (your skills, your efforts) ad the other half and you provide that at your cost however you value it. You see only the out of pocket money spent on the server and O/S. In business when you have 1 Power System and one person managing it you like this. If you replace it with dozens (I've seen hundreds!) of commodity servers, and a team of administrators you haven't "saved money with cheap servers" you've incumbered the company with hundreds of thousands of dollars of recurring costs.

It's a point of view thing.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis.

On 9/1/2012 9:57 AM, Mark D wrote:

I would be really surprised if this was true but I have no solid figures whatsoever to back it up. If I'm ever pricing it all out I would keep an open mind. If this is true then that makes a lot more sense. But I can't imagine how IBM I pricing/performance could beat a blade center or especially a rack of say 10 1u servers.

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 1, 2012, at 2:03 AM, Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

From: Mark D
I understand that you can do literally almost anything on an i.
The question is why you would want to spend those cpu cycles
and memory on something you can do for much cheaper on a
linux box.

Regarding cost, that depends on whether you're talking about application development vs. running production workloads. If you're pursuing a hobby or developing an application, you're right; a PC is going to cost less. However, under a production scenarios, the choice is more often whether to manage server farms including high-cost database servers, or consolidate workloads under a single IBM i server. Server farms are almost always more expensive than consolidating workloads under IBM i.

-Nathan.
--
This is the Midrange Systems Technical Discussion (MIDRANGE-L) mailing list
To post a message email: MIDRANGE-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
visit: http://lists.midrange.com/mailman/listinfo/midrange-l
or email: MIDRANGE-L-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives
at http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l.