Jorge,
If you ask three different people, you will get three different answers.
A better question that I should ask you is "what is your primary
objective?" For example, if you asked IBM what is the best server you
should buy, they would ask what are you going to use it for? If you
want performance they might recommend a Power P. if TCO is what you are
all about then IBM i. If scaling transactional workload into the
stratosphere is your goal then maybe a System z. You get my point?
Each of these systems is wonderful in its own way. You need to give us
more parameters. Because if performance is all you care about then
maybe a Power P might be what you need? Are you interested in less
servers? Is the IBM i still in the cards for the long term? What are
you and your organizations goals? Cost issues? Staffing concerns?
Now, for my own opinion based upon what you said. You have an
investment in Linux, IBM i, PHP and MySQL. All of which can be
consolidated on an IBM i. So let's say you consolidate all of this on
the IBM i. Well, if you have a new box with excess capacity I would say
no problem. If it is a Model 500 with 512 MB of RAM and 20GB of disk
operating at 90% capacity most of the time on V4R5 I would say stick
with what you got.
I would consolidate as much on to the IBM i as possible to maximize TCO
and simplify the infrastructure. Running a web server on the most
reliable box in the house just makes sense to me but I have been told
that I am a bit biased. Also, if you consolidate your PHP applications
on IBM i you can then use the i5 toolkit to call RPG programs directly
with no need for C+Java, ODBC, etc. It would all run natively. Many
customers are running this stuff on their intranets. But a few have
plugged in to the Internet. To see for yourself, check out the YiP's
PHP website where they have Sugar CRM running on an IBM i for the world
to see.
http://www.youngiprofessionals.com/site/
Others monitoring this thread might recommend Java or Net.Data or .Net.
But you already have an investment in talent with PHP, MySQL and IBM i.
Why not leverage that?
Good luck!
Regards,
Mike
-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Jorge Merino
Sent: Saturday, February 07, 2009 3:56 PM
To: web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [WEB400] 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
midrange.com
