Advise on Web topology on System i

Hi all.

I would like some advise from your experience serving web pages from the System I, let me me put some context:

For about a decade, we have been hosting and running web applications, dynamic custom web sites and just few static web sites; we used Linux servers and to balance the sites usage we had Back-end + Database + Archiving in one single server or in different servers, 95% of our development was done in PHP+MySQL.

In the other hand, System I related, we only have couple of low-usage web enabled programs that reads and provide data from our Legacy application on System i, we web-enabled those programs several years ago using PHP+MySQL to serve the Front-end, and for the back-end we built some C+Java tools that called any RPG program, that is the best we could do several years ago.

We are in the process on learn and prototyping with EGL, of course getting involved with RDi and V6R1 to use Websphere and so on.

We are having some problems to make WAS 70 to work, we are already talking with the IBM support to see what is going on, I expect to have it working pretty soon.

After this long reading, here are the question guys, is it a good idea to keep the System I to serve back-end as well as front-end? How the performance will be affected? How many shops out there have their System i serving web pages and the back-end without issues? have you had to have different machines serving User Interface, Bussiness Logic, Database, Archiving?.

Your thoughts will be highly appreciated, I want to get good performance for our 5250 users plus our Web users as well.

Thank you.


Jorge Merino