AS/400 (Big Blue) vs Sequel Server platform 8.11 & beyond

tmackin

Reputable Poster
Looking for pros and cons of running 8.11+ on an AS/400 platform versus a sequel server based one. I am not technical but have a 30 year history with Big Blue prior to JDE OneWorld. I lost the battle six years ago but now we need to upgrade our hardware and would like to present a case for the AS/400 family. I am looking for comments on the differences of using either solution from a technical (CNC) perspective as well as a functional one. We are a small shop with about 50 concurrent users with about 15-20 being remote. We are using the financials, distribution and manufacturing modules. My personal feeling is that the AS/400 is more stable and has many more tools to manage and/or troubleshoot the system.

My gut tells me to go withthe E-series over sequel server running on HP Proliants. We currently have no in-house technical support familiar withthe AS/400.

The last time the company was sold by the reasoning that they could get 2 redundant servers cheaper than 2 AS/400's. My arguement was that Big Blue was so reliable you only needed one!

Any and all comments welcome and thank you in advance. Again, I am technically-challenged when it comes to this area.
 
[ QUOTE ]
My gut tells me to go withthe E-series over sequel server running on HP Proliants. We currently have no in-house technical support familiar withthe AS/400.

The last time the company was sold by the reasoning that they could get 2 redundant servers cheaper than 2 AS/400's. My arguement was that Big Blue was so reliable you only needed one!

[/ QUOTE ]

Tim, You just presented the two arguements that are going to sink your case for Big Blue. I doubt your company would go from two SQL servers to one AS400. Big blue is reliable, but that's a single point of failure. Two AS400's would be much more expensive than two SQL servers. Also, don't discount the skillset portion of the formula. I'm not a Big Blue guy, but I'm guessing that there is a bit of a ramp up period needed to support that hardware for a techie who was brought up in the Wintel world.

Gregg Larkin
Praxair North American System Admin
JDE CNC and Security, Websphere, Tidal, Princeton Softech
 
Hi,

1.As I always say, the best platform is the one you master.

2.No platform is reliable or performant enough if you
don't have a sound knowledge of its technical
architecture and its impact on your daily operations.

Ask yourself a few questions on who's gonna :

Restore lost libraries or even the whole server?
Tune the database?
Apply PTFs, Service Packs, CUMs, etc?
Configure security and communications?
Interpret output from OS/400 management tools?
...etc...

3.Your team will either have to acquire these OS/400
technical skills to support JDE, or they will have to
contact someone else (outsourcing).

4.From a functional/application point of view, OneWorld is
OS/DB independent, however a few considerations apply :

a. If you have some 3rd-party apps running in AS/400
(RPG, COBOL, CL, or WorldSoftware) which interface with
OneWorld tables, then it makes sense to install on AS/400.

b. On the other hand, if you have lots of VB/Access/SQL
processes running around which will need to interface
with OneWorld, then the most natural choice would be to
install on Windows/SQL.

It's true that CPU, RAM and disks are cheaper on
Windows server than on AS/400 servers; however all that
money saving will be lost soon if nobody is there to
assist you with OS/400 intrincacies (read #2).

Regards
 
First of all, its totally false that an AS/400 is 100% reliable and stable. There are issues with the AS/400 that any quick look amongst the board will tell you about.

Platform choice, as I have always stated, is based on your experience. If you have oracle experience inhouse, then Oracle should be the database you go for. If you have Intel/SQL experience - then you should go with Windows/SQL. That is the ONLY requirement for platform choice that should be made, since the ongoing support of any platform is far more expensive than the initial expense of purchasing a platform.

The only time that the above statement isn't necessarily true is if you are looking at running significant numbers of concurrent users. Then, a certain platform type might be required. However, the numbers I'm talking about are in the 2000 and up range, so your 50 user implementation is a little far from that !

Intel has its own problems. Significantly and recently are the number of patches that need to be applied to windows machines. It seems that recently the number of patches have escalated to at least monthly, if not every two weeks - and as such, this can introduce instability in the base operating system. I personally would design around this by isolating the database servers completely seperately from the rest of the network, ensuring that a hardware firewall for example prevents interaction from other PC's.

Recently, I just migrated a customer from AS/400 to Windows SQL. I also published an article about the experience in the Quest magazine. The customer had predominantly Intel experience internally, and was fed up with the amount of downtime required for backups (they didn't want the very large expense of a second AS/400 for "hot" backups). I migrated them to a very high-end clustered Intel system (HP Proliants) with the HP EVA Storage Array - this is a very important and worthwhile piece of technology. After a very short period (a weekend), I managed to migrate the platform from the ASP (IBM) to inhouse SQL and the users hardly noticed the difference.

My biggest regret was probably using the clustering technology - I would probably not recommend using that again, since Clustering is often not tested with Microsoft updates. Another method probably would have been more satisfactory.

I stayed with the company, and help train up a member of staff to take over managing the implementation - I left at the beginning of December and they are 100% stable, and are saving more than $1m per year compared to their previous platform. They run a full cold backup in 5 minutes and have snapshot ability if necessary.

The big thing is they understand the technology. Almost everyone in the IT department now views OneWorld as yet another system to maintain compared to the "big scary" AS/400 !
 
John,

Despite your claims, no system is 100% reliable or stable, not even the one you designed.

Although you're trying to come off as unbiased, it's pretty clear you are biased against AS/400 and biased for Wintel.

I'm curious what backup system allows backup of a full JDE installation in 5 minutes.

I'm also curious where you got the $1 million savings. This must have been a huge installation, like Enterprise Rent-a-Car, to save that much by migrating away from IBM.
 
[ QUOTE ]
John,

Despite your claims, no system is 100% reliable or stable, not even the one you designed.

Although you're trying to come off as unbiased, it's pretty clear you are biased against AS/400 and biased for Wintel.

I'm curious what backup system allows backup of a full JDE installation in 5 minutes.

I'm also curious where you got the $1 million savings. This must have been a huge installation, like Enterprise Rent-a-Car, to save that much by migrating away from IBM.

[/ QUOTE ]

Bill, Bill, Bill! If there's one thing I've learned on this forum, it's never a good idea to flame Jon. Jon actually knows what he's doing.

To dose your flames - he did not claim that his system was 100% reliable, he claimed that the IT staff was 100% stable with his configuration.

From what I've read of Jon's posts, he's pretty unbiased when it comes to platforms.

Jon's post mentioned setting up an HP EVA Storage Array. On a storage array, it is possible to take disk "snapshots" capturing a system state in minutes rather than hours. He didn't mention it, but the IT guys probably then do a tape back up of the snapshot and eventually release the sanpshot disk space back to the array.

The other point that you missed is that the company moved from an Application Service Provider (ASP) to hosting JDE in-house. That is where the cost savings comes in.
 
Sorry

Let me rephrase what I stated. They HAVE been 100% stable since they went live, of course no system is 100% stable as I stated right at the beginning.

The customer was paying signicantly for IBM to host their implementation - including all Terminal Servers and Deployment Server. There was a monthly amount that worked out to be very significant. That, together with the communication costs to IBM's Data Center, amounted to approximately $1.5m per year for approximately 150 concurrent users. The AS/400 had a total DASD capacity of approximately 1Tb and this was starting to cause serious concerns since the customer wished to have more testing areas.

The new Intel system cost a TOTAL of $500k - this included an HP EVA, two Database Servers, 3 Application servers and 9 Terminal Servers and all the communication equipment from my design. Total storage started with 4.5Tb and increased to 8 Tb for a later additional $15,000 (73Gb 15K RPM Fibre Drives cost as low as $200 ea !)

The backup actually is immediate. A snapshot occurs at the database transaction level, and the entire production database is backed up to disk SEVERAL TIMES - snapshot occurs in milliseconds - but there is a "5 minute" period of quiet every night to ensure that the entire database has no transactions. Additionally, Transactional Backups of the entire database occur at 15 minute intervals.

So, for a TOTAL cost of $500k - the company saved significantly. They then hired a single competent Microsoft guy fulltime, which also eliminated staffing costs pretty dramatically. The joke is that the entire OneWorld implementation now costs about the same price as the T1 used to cost !

As for my Bias/Unbias, you'll see documents and whitepapers from both sides of the fence written by me. However, I'd say that today, the Intel architecture that I described above is superior to the AS/400 architecture for the same cost. I'm certain, however, that IBM will come up with technology that will change this !
 
John,

Sorry, I didn't mean to come off as though I was flaming you. It's the first Monday I've worked in a month (file under "Lame Excuses").

Thanks for the clarification. I thought you were generally pretty unbiased, and was honestly surprised by your original answer. Alas, I didn't read the Quest article (I rarely find anything useful there) and I did miss the ASP part of your response. I will say that company was spending an astronomical amount of money per user for that solution. Kudos to you for finding a better one for them.

You're right, you can't get an IBM solution that compares to what you designed for the same price. Although IBM has dramatically reduced the price of the iSeries line, iSeries solutions are still substantially more costly than similar Intel solutions (to the extent there can be any actual similarity).
 
Thats good you came back so soon ! I'm hoping other companies out there spending equally large amounts would second-think their solution. Not to say move from AS/400 to a different platform - the AS/400 while more expensive is still ideal for those customers with inhouse AS/400 expertise (it also provides some differences that the Intel platform might not be able to meet) - but moving from a dedicated ASP to inhouse support with perhaps external CNC support on internal hardware. This is definately the future of EnterpriseOne management.
 
Jon is unbiased about platforms?
cool.gif
 
Yes. I'm very unbiased when it comes to platforms - but I'm biased towards common sense when it comes to cost/performance/scalability !
 
Out of curiosity does JDE utilize true 64 bit architecture at all? I guess what I am looking for is that the OS may be 64 bit, but are the kernels written such that they take advantage of the 64 bit architecture.
 
No. All JDE code is written using ANSI 32bit code - clients AND server.
 
As always there pros/cons to each. Although I have used primarily the 3X series for most of my career I have know oppositon to changing. If there is a real reason to change, money(yes), stability(probably not), but I know that any new development is being done in JDE and not using AS/400 programming tools such as RPG or Sequel. In the future we may go to another platform and want to be ready, as much as possible. I have working with E1 using an Oracle DB and have not been to impressed. How many times do you hear of an DB2/400 database dropping? But with linux and Oracle it is becoming cheaper and cheaper and let's you spend more of that precious budget on development and projects that can help make an company money versus being just an overhead. ~ Angelis
 

Similar threads

E9.2 AS400 database and Linux Enterprise Server
Replies
3
Views
349
Kim Schmidt
WinPrice
E9.0 Turning off SQLPKGs
Replies
4
Views
1K
WinPrice
WinPrice
E8.11 Deployment server restore
Replies
1
Views
1K
MFreitag
MFreitag
E9.2 Object Usage Tracking - Retention and Exclusions
Replies
3
Views
2K
andymcclure
E9.2 Trying to access Business data (sequel) through MS-Access
Replies
1
Views
2K
BOster
BOster
Back
Top