IBM i. Just More Reliable

Running Out Of Kerosene Can Be Worse Than Running Out Of Gas… Much Worse.

Have you ever seen someone walking down a road carrying a can of gasoline? Sure you have. Running out of gas is not all that uncommon, and it certainly is a hassle.

But when was the last time you heard of an airliner running out of gas? Actually, airliners don’t run on gasoline, they run on jet fuel, which is essentially a grade of kerosene.

When an airliner runs out of fuel, it’s more than a hassle, it’s a disaster. And the reason it happens so rarely is because it’s a disaster. Modern jetliners are equipped with redundant safety features and reserve fuel tanks precisely because running out of fuel is utterly unacceptable.

Similar considerations apply to servers, whose unplanned downtime can be either a hassle or a disaster. But either way, as an IBM i (iSeries/AS400) owner it’s nice to know that you’re flying a plane, not driving a car. A car has a “low fuel” indicator on the dashboard, and if that’s not enough to keep you from running out of fuel, lots of luck, pal. In contrast, every IBM i server is designed to minimize unscheduled downtime…and the difference shows up in every performance comparison study ever made.

A Gartner Research study found that the IBM i is 43 times more reliable than a Windows server. The study found that the average Windows server suffers from an average of 224.5 hours of unplanned outages annually, compared to 5.2 hours for the IBM i and 23.6 hours for a Unix Server.

Unplanned outages…unscheduled downtime…running out of gas. Call it what you will, it’s a fact of life in the Windows world and the cost is staggering. What if yourcompany suffered like that? 200 hours would amount to five weeks a year during which your staff could not look up an inventory item, create an invoice, service a customer or worst of all, fill an order. What would that cost your company?

That brings us to the larger issue of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Unplanned downtime is just one of many factors that determine TCO.

The research firms of IDC and The Meta Group have both published recent reports that show the IBM i has the lowest total cost of ownership compared to UNIX and Windows. The IDC study, for example, shows the IBM at $3,800 annual cost per user, UNIX at $5,400, and Windows at $6,200 annual cost per user. This study points out that with 10 users an IBM i server could save an organization upwards of $120,000 over five years.

What about deployment time? The Meta Group found that the IBM i is three times quicker to deploy than Windows and UNIX servers. In addition, their survey determined that IBM i installations usually take less time than planned while UNIX and Windows installations take more time than planned. The benefit? IBM i users can begin to recover their investment almost two months earlier than UNIX or Windows users.

Given these well-known—and meticulously documented—benefits, why would anyIBM i owner consider abandoning their platform in favor of Windows? The temptation lies in the greater number of software titles for Windows. Just as there are many more cars on the road than there are jetliners in the air, so too there are many more gas stations for cars than there are jet fuel vendors at airports.

The question to ask is, “Do I have to compromise on software if I stick with IBM?” The answer is, “Absolutely not!” Not on capabilities, not on performance, not on price. There is a perfectly logical reason why this is true. A disproportionate number of the best software products for mission critical applications happen to run on IBM i servers because—like jet airliners—IBM i servers were designed and built for maximum reliability. And the very definition of mission critical is that reliability is of the essence.

Pick any category of mission critical software and compare the available products for IBM i servers with the larger selection for other servers. In each case you will find that the best-in-class solution—on the basis of cost-effectiveness—runs on IBM i servers. The point is that you don’t need the biggest selection of candidate solutions; you need the best single solution for your own operation.