RE: The Perpetual Myth of iSeries Obsolescence

["Douglas W. Palme" <dpalme@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

We have a p5 550, and yes the quote contained a separate price for the OS
and additional tools, including DB2
 

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ingvaldson, Scott
Sent: Friday, April 28, 2006 11:17 AM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: The Perpetual Myth of iSeries Obsolescence

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