Re: Anybody know the record for the longest an AS/400 has been contiuously up?

Re: Badmouthing: See Terry's comments early in the thread.

I've been trying to reinforce what Buck said. Windows is here and it's
more than good enough for the vast majority of businesses. It's reliable
enough, stable enough, and believe it or not secure enough (when configured
properly, which every platform requires for "secure enough" operation). It
also scales both out & up on modern hardware.

That's not promoting MS; just stating modern IT reality. The same
statements can be made about Unix & Linux.

For the group, we are naturally biased towards out platform of choice and
there's nothing wrong with that. But promoting IBM i needs to be done
based on the platform's strengths and with the understanding that the
competition is not idle. That yesterday's weaknesses probably don't apply
today. And that by most requirements that matter to a business, Windows is
competitive. Not necessarily superior, but competitive. IBM i has to win
in that environment, and I'm glad you're having success.



On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 12:46 PM, Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nor will the i community ... be taken seriously when they badmouth
Windows.

I'm not sure what you might mean about badmouthing Windows, but it seems a
bit unfair to promote Microsoft's solutions on THIS LIST with complete
impunity. Those who do seem to be asking for, shall we say less
than affirmative feedback ;-)

The world needs more IBM i on Power advocates, and if not this list, then
where? My company has had modest success at migrating new customers off
Windows and MS SQL Server to IBM i on Power. I look forward to more of the
same as time passes, and I'm willing to share information with the faithful
in particular, about competing successfully against Microsoft's solutions.

Azure's Storage solutions are actually a fair deal. I pretty much agree
with the cloud services business model, and believe that outsourcing backup
storage and possibly other computing to cloud service providers would be
best for many organizations.

I just wanted to make it clear that 99.9% uptime for Azure's Storage
solutions does not apply to it's server solutions, except with a lot of
extra work, and a lot of extra cost. It's true that one can't provision an
Azure virtual machine without provisioning storage too. But given the fact
that Microsoft makes 3 replicas of the data, it's also likely that they are
using very high capacity and cheap SATA drives.

It's still a truism that concerning cheap, fast, high-capacity, and
reliability at the disk unit level, you can only get two and a half out of
the four in a single package.

-Nathan






----- Original Message -----
From: John Jones <chianime@xxxxxxxxx>
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc:
Sent: Saturday, March 16, 2013 6:20 AM
Subject: Re: Anybody know the record for the longest an AS/400 has been
contiuously up?

"Azure's provisioning interfaces are pretty slick, but you can find
something quite comparable by using IBM Smartcloud Entry, on Power
Servers."

Which is ultimately my point. Microsoft's server offerings are mature,
stable, and secure. The i community cannot afford to ignore that. Nor
will the i community (or the Linux/Unix and mainframe communities) be taken
seriously when they badmouth Windows. Quite simply: The maturity state of a
decade ago just doesn't matter today.


BTW, if you're buying storage, yeah, you use the storage model. But I was
talking about adding storage to a provisioned server. For that you don't
sign up for any added services; storage is built in to the server
provisioning model. Cost scales as you add more capacity & complexity, but
it remains dirt cheap compared to running your own infrastructure.


MS is doing a road show around the US covering IaaS - Infrastructure as a
Service. It's free and takes an entire day. Presentations in the morning
and labs in the afternoon (and free breakfast/lunch) where you create and
manage your own Azure server images & mini-VLAN using the free 90 day trial
account. I'd encourage anyone who wants to see an approach to
virtualization other than IBM's to sign up.
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