Re: First time buying System i5

[Tom Liotta <qsrvbas@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

albartell wrote:
> Based on comments from this group I called back IBM and worked through what
> I think I will need for a configuration.  One area that I was surprised at,
> that is going to cost a boat load of money more, is that each LPAR needs to
> have it's own exclusive HD's.  So for a 3 LPAR machine I would need a
> minimum of 9 35GB HD's (optimally 12 so each LPAR could have 4 each).  That
> means for HD's alone the cost is $14,388 (ouch).  Note though that memory
> can be shared across LPARS.

Al:

It's possible that you will have no problem with 3-drive RAID sets. 
If you aren't doing major database stuff, you possibly won't notice 
it. We're running 3-drive RAID sets on a 4-LPAR 520 and it screams 
(compared to the 270 and a couple other systems it replaced, all 
with quite a few more drives).

But we're a software house. We aren't running "applications" as such.

Now, running a full Product Build, where 100s of objects are being 
created and many programs run through full optimization, still puts 
quite a load on. But the throughput improvement is still in the 
range of 3000%.

It can depend on your workload.


Tom Liotta