Re: Moving forward or backward... -- MIDRANGE-L

On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 23:40, Mike Amos <yl_mra@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

First, the original Power 520's were throttled down, I have one and it
works just fine for my limited needs as a single user. The base model
only has one disk drive mirrored pair and the OS takes up most of the
space. However, I can run multiple process on it and use it for testing
and the response is acceptable as long as I am careful in regard to the
disk storage. Try that on Windows of the same vintage and see how many
times a month you have to re-boot the thing to keep it stable.

I still have several x346 in my lab, which are roughly the same
vintage as the first eServer iSeries 520's (2004/2005). They're
horribly outdated by now (as are the first 520s). They work as well,
but they're no longer usuable for most tasks, since they lack CPU
power (single core, hyperthreaded Netburst-Xeons).

The world, however, does turn and the IBM i is no longer throttled as it
was and the box is ideally suited for mid-range business needs and for
very large companies with the need for a dependable, high availability,
high rate transaction processing system. It scales well in a clustered
environment and the utilization for added CPUs scales exceptionally well.

That sounds like something out of a marketing blurb. When the 515 and
user based pricing was announced, i hoped that IBM would finally get
us machines with good performance at decent prices.

It's not like the whole Power platform is a slow - but that it's
vastly overpriced. It's not a problem to a get a fast Power 520 - it's
just that they have an unreasonable price.

It supports all
of the major file systems.

What? The major file systems are NTFS and FAT32. The IBM i OS supports
neither. Not that this is any kind of problem - it doesn't have to.
It's just that i don't get what you're talking about here.

In conclusion, please stop using a hobbled, over priced system for your
comparison when there are many other models out there that can slam your
Windows/UNIX systems into the ground when used the way IBM i was and is
designed to be used.

I'm talking about the Power 520 base configuration (E4A) with two
Mirrored 147GB Disks, 2GB of RAM and 1 out of 2 cores on a single
Power 6 4.2 Ghz CPU activated (4300 CPW) with per-User pricing. I even
posted sample configurations way back.

If you keep track of such things, you know that
IBM's comparison benchmarks of i/5 to AIX, before they merged IBM i and
AIX, showed that IBM i outperformed AIX when the benchmarks were heavily
I/O bound.

This isn't about i5/OS vs. AIX. This is about the hardware and it's
price. With two mirrored 147GB Disks, you'll always be hobbled by the
slow disk subsystem. Of course you can fix that by adding the RAID
enabler with cache and getting up to 5+1 Disks in RAID5. That'll work
well, and you'll have a box with decent performance, but it will still
suck at CPU-bound tasks - because all you've got is a single core.

P.S. If your customers don't like the green screen, use a secure web
interface of your own design. The functionality is there.

We've moved off green screen back in 2001, and dropped all support for
our Green Screen software several years ago. Our software is current.
IBM's pricing isn't.