1st you need a new BP. Your current one doesn't understand current i
technology.
As has been mentioned the IXA and IXS cards are phasing out. The IXS cards
were wonderful and had $0 maintenance but they were not as flexible from a
total memory and CPU standpoint. You had options up to a single 2Ghz
processor and that was it. The IXA had many more options on the server
side but they were more costly and had significant cables to deal with as
they were on the HSL loop. They also had to be 2U form factor or larger
due to the IXA itself.
Enter iSCSI. Now you can support 1U 'pizza box' servers which are much
more cost effective. These can be small single core units or larger dual,
quad and larger. Because the have no disks in them the typical 1U server
has plenty of moxy to support a lot of Windoze. In addition the connection
back to your i is via Ethernet cables so it's much simpler, cheaper, and
easier to route. Even cooler is that you can now host servers on Blades.
Need three? No sweat. Gotta add two more? Simple. You get the capability
of the blade center with the disk management of IBM i. You keep technology
that you know and consolidate your windows stuff. Oh and you can run
Linux too.
Someone mentioned VMware. Cool technology and it IS Supported on these
iSCSI attached servers. You may only need couple servers if you utilize
VMware.
Remember that your i is the SAN in this environment. Some will say "But i
disk is expensive!". OK but you've always gotten what you paid for. In the
SAN school though your Windoze data is scattered across all your disks so
you get good performance and you only allocate as much disk as required
(since you can expand it on the fly) so you don't chew up 100s of GB just
to load up a single server.
NO MATTER WHAT you use consult with a partner that knows this stuff so
that it gets set up correctly. Multipath I/O, proper placement of the
iSCSI cards on the i side, correct disk setup and proper network planning.
None of this stuff is hard if you understand it, all of it is hard if you
are guessing.
- Larry
Larry Bolhuis IBM Certified Advanced Technical Expert -
System i Solutions
Vice President IBM Certified Systems Expert:
Arbor Solutions, Inc. System i Technical Design and
Implementation V5R4
1345 Monroe NW Suite 259 eServer i5 iSeries LPAR Technical
Solutions, V5R3
Grand Rapids, MI 49505 IBM Certified Specialist
System i Integration with BladeCenter
and System x V1
(616) 451-2500 System i IT Simplification: Linux
Technical V5R4
(616) 451-2571 - Fax iSeries System Administrator for OS/400
V5R3
(616) 260-4746 - Cell
If you can read this, thank a teacher....and since it's in English,
thank a soldier.
I'm looking or people who know more than I do, so of course I came right
over here :-). My company is looking to consolidate its windows servers,
and I ran across this article:
http://www.infordata.net/inforweb.static/documents/newsletter/ISSE1007.pdf
that makes it sound as if we could do it all on our iSeries (we've got a
model 9406-520). From the article, it looked as if we could
* set up several windows servers using the Integrated xSeries Server cards
* dynamically allocate disk space among the iSeries and the various
windows servers
* use our existing tape backup system to back up the windows data at the
same time we're backing up our iSeries data
Then we talked to our BP, who said it's not that simple. According to
them,
** the integrated server cards aren't recommended because they're hard to
upgrade, and we'd be better off with the Integrated xSeries Adapters (and
some boxes to put them in)
** the disk would need to be split between the windows servers and the
iSeries, and we couldn't just dynamically shift it around
** we'd need a separate LPAR to handle the windows stuff
** we'd be better off with a separate backup system for the window stuff
All of which makes it look a LOT less worth it, but I'm not convinced --
hence my question. Does anyone have experience with either of these
environments? Is it as great as the article makes it sound, or is our BP
closer to the mark? If we're looking to
centralize storage, management, and backup, is this a good option, or we
better off just going with a windows SAN (the other option)?
Thanks very much for your help,
Mike Naughton
Senior Programmer/Analyst
Judd Wire, Inc.
124 Turnpike Road
Turners Falls, MA 01376
413-863-4357 x444
mnaughton@xxxxxxxxxxxx
midrange.com
