Things Like Viruses, Security Holes, Downtime, Systems Management by Humans, And An Ever-Growing IT Staff
- Microsoft Windows’ predisposition to viruses is well known. But do you have any idea how extensive it is? A few years ago I did a Google search on “Microsoft Windows virus” and got over 68,500,000 hits! Do the same for “IBM i (OS400) virus,” and you will get 0 hits. This is a telltale indication that IBM i is much more stable than Windows…and far less virus-prone. It is a fact that no IBM i user has experienced unplanned downtime from any virus.
- Windows is a not only less than stable platform, it is riddled with security holes and hidden costs. It is the IT industry “crash queen” of platforms. When was the last time you had to reboot your desktop to fix a Windows problem? Today…yesterday? Speaking from personal—and immediate—experience, I already had to do it several times today, and I am a computer expert.
- The IBM i self-managing data management reduces cost and complexity. All the other servers (UNIX, Linux, Windows, etc.) require a computer technician or service to allocate disk space for each program and data file, to specify their location on the disk, and when a disk fills up, to re-allocate space on a new disk. Those of you with bitter experience in the non-IBM world will perhaps smile at the following question: How many times have you had to get someone to load a program and create the path to the f drive, or relocate a data file to an m drive?
The IBM i does all these things dynamically and automatically. It runs itself, dynamically managing program data location, allocation and relocation…so you can focus on your own business instead of on the technology of your tools.
- The IBM i server needs little or no IT staff. We know of a $2 billion enterprise that runs its business on an IBM i server supporting 1,200 users in 14 divisions in 7 time zones from Australia to Hungary …with an IT staff of 2! Your own experience may, of course, vary somewhat in either direction.
Just down the street is a $250 million company in the same industry, running its business on a UNIX server with Oracle. They have only 100 users, but they need an IT staff of 20 teammates! Plus, their ERP system, acquired about the same time as their $2 billion competitor, is still not completely rolled out.
Further, industry studies document that Windows networks need to staff one Windows Network Administrator per 25–50 users, depending on the application.
- Most IBM i servers have little or no downtime in a year. Gartner Research, a leading technology consulting organization, released a study that showed the IBM i to have on average 5.2 hours per year of unplanned downtime, though many users have run many years without ever experiencing any downtime at all. The same report revealed 224.5 hours of unplanned downtime for Windows.
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