System iNetwork

This is the third report on the unlimited license for the 515 I have seen today. You are the only one who pointed out the limitation in memory and disk arms. The real issue is the disk arms. Unlimited users on a 515 is a critical situation (critsit) waiting to happen. MPG's performance Navigator can show customers the CPU percent busy at which the disk will become the bottleneck, thus setting the customer expectation.

P.S. Performance Navigator can also count concurrent users.

This remembers me on the S/36 Version of the AS/400. All companies with "old" iSeries with close to a minimal configuration, up to 16 diskarms and a stable environment are perfect candidates for a 515.

If they like to stay with the System i but do not plan for additional workload, this is a perfect "DOWNSIZE" on (maintenance) costs with a big performance improvement at the same time.
The disk arm problem is partially addressed with improved controller cache (30% fewer arms are OK). Additonally, sizing the memory big and using SETOBJACC, this machines wil run like hell for them at a stunning price.

For IBM, this will keep customers on this platform even if they do not plan to improve. When the customers then have the power in their hands, they may change their mind.

The 515 sounds good to me, but I am told that you can't have an internal dvd-ram drive in this machine.

Chris,
your comment -When the customers then have the power in their hands, they may change their mind.
- caught my attention.

I sure do hope this is the case, because I know from experience the frustration amongst customers (still) using entry level boxes is skyhigh.

Lately, I was visiting such a customer who ditched the iSeries platform long time ago except for the accounting department, about five employees. They wanted to speed up the night backup, which they did by ftp-ing savf files to a remote PC server. The transport of about 25GB of data took them 5 hours. I looked into the configuration and found the ethernet card was set at a linkspeed of 10mb/s. Ha, problem found, I thought, change it to 100mb/s and voila, should run at a 'screaming' 10 megabytes/second instead of 1 megabyte/second. They used a model 170 entry level box, installed in 2002, so what were the results? I noted the ftp job consumed about 60% cpu, which was odd since this was the only job running. Presumably ftp is a heavy burden for the machine. After the change of the linkspeed from 10mb/s to 100mb/s, the cpu for the ftp job increased to 65% and the actual datatransfer ran about 5% faster, around 1.05 megabytes/sec. I had to calm down the IT manager (he was the only IT employee in the company) for not kicking the box out the door. At least he shortened the 5 hours run time with 5 minutes.

So I was wondering, do these entry level boxes 515 run like hell? For IBM's sake, lets hope so, but I'm afraid this IT manager is beyond convincing.