RE: i5 Youngsters

EMC has just announced SSDs for their SANs. I'm not sure when they'll
ship (or what they'll cost!), but I'd assume this year. I'm typing this
off-line so I can't look up the announcement at the moment.

PCI-X v. -E: Cache transfers may benefit but we also need the Infiniband
implementation to up the intra-frame transfer speed before that's of
much use beyond the internal CEC drives. HSL at 2GB/s is already quite
fast although not quite full bus speed & certainly slower than main
storage..

I can understand the frustration about automating PTFs but also consider
the flip side. In organizations that have to adhere to SOX, SAS70,
other audit standards, or frameworks like COBIT, all changes to the
system must have associated change management records. So any automated
system still fails the test as accompanying change management records
would be missing. Our auditors look at installed PTFs and check them
against our change management system.

Change management is a hassle but it's critical to do in any regulated
environment. It's also quite useful when troubleshooting so it's
beneficial in unregulated environments as well.

That's not to say we couldn't have an automated method but have it be
optional, like MS provides with SUS & MOM. But MS fails that test on
occasion with silent installation of unapproved updates. And even if
you use SUS/MOM now you're talking about yet another server in the farm.

For me, when we do the change management process for adding PTFs it's
pretty easy to point Fix Central at the system and get everything in one
shot. Only takes a minute or two per LPAR and then I ignore the browser
for a while.

Bind: Then IBM should fix it/move to a newer release. Have they fixed
it in V5R4? How many System i shops use Bind on System i? It may not
be worth the effort. Not an excuse but development dollars are always
limited.

Intel v. POWER: Which Intel CPUs have 30+MB Cache? Which exceed 4.7GHz?
Which lead the spec benchmarks? If you're going to compare current
Intel chips you have to use current POWER chips - POWER6 @ 4.7GHz.
Itanium could have been competitive if Intel had used x86-64, but they
wanted a departure and let AMD define 64-bit x86 computing. Intel has
good processor technology - I have 3 Quad Core systems at home - but
they compete more with horizontal scaling than vertical. They do get
better each generation, though.

I can tell you our iSeries running JDE with a 200+GB database runs
circles around our SQL servers that handle 20-60GB databases. That
iSeries LPAR is 1.5 1.6GHz POWER5s and the SQL Servers are dual-quad
core Xeons. And the iSeries is running everything - presentation, apps,
batch, database while the SQL servers are running SQL server and have
other servers for the presentation & app layers (curious how Windows
doesn't seem to understand much in the way of batch workloads).