RE: The Perpetual Myth of iSeries Obsolescence

["Ingvaldson, Scott" <SIngvaldson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm not a pSeries person, but I'm sure that someone will correct me if I
say anything wrong.  

It's my understanding that the p5 price includes hardware only, isn't
there an extra charge even for the O/S?  I know that DB2 costs extra,
and what about all of the management utilities?  As always, the true
cost is the TCO, but it takes a good amount of reasearch and experience
to come up with those numbers.

If you need a p5, then you need a p5.  The advantage to being able to
run your AIX binaries in PASE is that if you already have an i5
installed you don't need to buy a p5 as well.  

A couple of years ago I was in a development session for the HMC user
interface.  The group was evenly split between iSeries admins and
pSeries admins, most of whom were already using some type of HMC.  When
the discussion got around to virtual resources the pSeries admins were
asking lots of questions about things like virtual ethernet and virtual
optical.  Even though the i and p hardware had been similar for nearly
10 years they had never heard of these capabilities.

So the short answer is that's what you're paying for.  Ease of use;
extra functionality, even if you refuse to use it; knowing that whatever
you need, it's already in there.  And the most reliable system on the
planet...

Regards,
 
Scott Ingvaldson
iSeries System Administrator
GuideOne Insurance Group


-----Original Message-----
date: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 11:39:24 -0400
from: "Richter,Steve" <Steve.Richter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: RE: The Perpetual Myth of iSeries Obsolescence


-----Original Message-----
From: Ingvaldson, Scott [mailto:SIngvaldson@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, April 28, 2006 9:44 AM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: The Perpetual Myth of iSeries Obsolescence

>The i5/Series is really the ultimate consolidation platform; almost
>nothing is incompatible with it, almost anything will run on it in some
>shape or form.  What other box can say that?

2 or 3 yrs ago the p5 and i5 were the same price. Since that time, IBM
has cut the price of the p5 to the point where today, a p5 is 1/3 the
price of the i5.  What is the business case for running an AIX workload
on an i5 that costs $25K when the same workload can run on a p5 for $7K?


I was told recently that MySQL AIX binaries can run asis in PASE. Same
with PHP even before the official Zend implementation. That is great
technology. What is the advantage to using PASE instead of running the
real thing, PHP on the p5?

-Steve