On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 10:30 PM, Pete Massiello
<pmassiello-ml@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I agree that IBM's prices were out of this world, but hardware has
come down. Yes, with Power 6 the hardware is down, but now you pay
additional for the i5/OS so it's somewhat of a wash, but it is still
cheaper. But isn't that where the value is in i5/OS? Why wouldn't we want
to pay for it?
It has come down, but the problem is still the same. For 20kCHF you
can get a baseline model 515 - or a heck of a System x. And this is
where the problem starts.
Now a little fun. Wow you must have fast laptops over there. We
installed a 515 at a customer last year, and they have about 75 users on it
It all depends on what the loadout is. A baseline 515 has 1GB RAM and
2 15kRPM 70GB arms (mirrored). Have you ever used such a
configuration? They're incredibly slow. IPL takes around 30-45
minutes, depending on what you have to start. Even smaller DB queries
will lead to further, slow disk IO. My Laptop has 3GB of RAM - when
dealing with 2GB of Data running on SQL Server Express Edition,
everything is blazingly fast. And even when doing drive IO, for some
reason the laptop is still faster than the 515. (Why? I have no idea -
my main guess would be that i5/OS was never optimized to deal with
systems with only a single disk arm)
Switching to a 4 arm configuration with RAID5 by adding 2 disks and
upgrading the internal controller helps a lot - but adds another 7k to
the price tag.
3k per 15kRPM 70GB is unreasonable - especially when you can get the
same physical drive with a different low level formatting and firmware
for 0.5k in the System x world.
And now, if we take a reasonable 515 configuration - 4 GB of RAM,
RAID5, 4 arms with its ~30k price tag we're already waaayyy out of
bounds for a small businesses.
Of course x86 based servers aren't dirt cheap either - a reasonable
System x configuration for a small business still clocks around 10k
(all inclusive, HW, SW, SW Assurance, HW maintenance). But the System
x you can get for that price has much better hardware, like a high
capacity LTO drive instead of a slow and unreliable 72GB DAT drive,
etc. (Software platform is assumed to be Microsoft Windows Server for
Small Business Premium, which has a featureset comparable to i5/OS in
terms of end user functionality, Hardware Platform a System x3650).
But here, the next problem starts - for some customers 10k is too high
- so you offer a cheaper System, like an x3200 with SATA disk drives -
yes, those machines are slow as hell and have unreliable hardware
(like VXA tapedrives), but you can offer them for just 5k!
I hear that pricing has come down for the POWER6 systems, but pricing
in Switzerland still seems to be rather confused, i'm still not able
to get my hands on hard numbers, much less a shipping date for POWER6
(we just received two new 515 this week). Note that we never had such
shipping/pricing problems on the System x side, the hardware was
usually shipping here one week after the US shipping date.
midrange.com
