Re: Microsoft .NET frontending IBM i

[Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen
> How expensive is such a "capacity on demand"-upgrade, and what do you
> do when you run out of these upgrades or they get too expensive?


Cost for COD?  I don't have specific numbers.  We added 5X capacity for 2X the 
price of the original server; that was 4 years ago.  The cost obviously depends 
on the capacity of the server.  Was that a rhetorical question?  It appears to 
me that the price/performance for Power 7 servers has dropped so significantly, 
that Intel no longer has that advantage.  The real advantage of centralizing 
workloads under IBM i is that it takes less time for technical support.  I 
believe that time would be better utilized developing new systems with new 
databases and user interfaces with best coding practices, that reduce 
complexity.  Disparate systems are too fragile and complex.

What happens after the COD is exhausted?  I might turn that around and ask what 
happens when an MS SQL server system can't keep up with loads driven by 
application server farms?  IBM i can now scale to 256 cores without 
partitioning.  What does Windows scale to without partitioning. IBM i also runs 
under blades, if you really think a server farm has an advantage.

-Nathan