RE: iSeries TCO v NT server farm

[rob@xxxxxxxxx]

I do recall seeing a recent article from someone at IBM about how many 
people truly need 24x7x365.  Most people don't need that kind of uptime. 
The law of diminishing returns starts to hit as the window of downtime 
shrinks.  Here's a hypothetical question:  How much would it cost Toys R 
Us to reduce that one 2 hour window of downtime per year that occurs from 
2 am to 4am CDT?  If the costs included:
- New location (Hey if one location is down for building upgrade and the 
other burns down you'd better have a third, right?)
- New mainframe
- Mass duplication of networking equipment
- etc

Versus the potential loss of business from some nightowl trying to buy 
their kid a Barbie doll?

Don't laugh.  More than once has our primary system gone down while we 
were doing maintenance on the backup system.  We're actually looking at 
the third leg - and this is just for our Domino availability.  We don't 
even have a second leg for our DB2 availability.


Rob Berendt