Guild Companies

Every 12 to 18 months or so, IBM rejiggers or substantially revamps the OS/400 server line. Soon thereafter, like sunshine after much-needed rain, the analysts at International Data Corp present a study of one aspect or another of the OS/400 platform that helps IBM and OS/400 shops make their economic and technical arguments for the platform. With such a big repackaging of the OS/400 platform in January, IBM had a lot of options in commissioning a study from IDC. But this time around, IDC was instructed to focus on Wintel and Lintel server consolidation onto the iSeries.

The vast majority of OS/400 shops--we've heard statistics from IBMers ranging from 75 percent to 85 percent--also use Windows platforms as adjuncts to their main production machines. While very few OS/400 customers probably have any production Linux machines doing useful work at this point, the ability to consolidate either Windows or Linux workloads onto Linux-based partitions on iSeries machines to cut down on the complexity and cost of supporting Web, print, file, firewall, and email infrastructure workloads is compelling. Linux is becoming established, and many companies are now willing, after four years of hype, to give it a whirl. Equally compelling, of course, is consolidating external Windows-based servers onto Integrated xSeries Server (IxS) coprocessors for the iSeries or using the Integrated xSeries Adapter (IxA) cards to attach external IBM xSeries machines to the iSeries system bus using a high-speed connection.

To put it bluntly, such Wintel and Lintel server consolidation is an easy case for Big Blue and IDC to make, and that is probably why they have opted to target the latest economic analysis aimed at the OS/400 market on this issue. In past IDC studies, IDC has used statistical analysis of the budgets of OS/400, Windows, and Unix shops to supposedly show that OS/400 servers have a lower total cost of ownership. I have always been extremely skeptical of these studies, which did not compare like-for-like environments--say, three different manufacturers, all running a particular ERP suite for a similar number of users--but rather averaged what companies on different platforms were spending and then compared them. Windows and Unix shops have relatively new applications, are relatively new to Windows or Unix, and are often doing very sophisticated work with very badly written code. OS/400 shops, by contrast, are often running streamlined, elegant, and efficient green-screen code in environments they know better than their extended families. It comes as no surprise to me, at least, that such OS/400 environments are less costly than Windows or Unix shops. But saying so misses the point.

Nonetheless, this was great "information" (quotes intentional for the purposes of sarcasm) if you are trying to convince your boss that you should keep the AS/400 or iSeries running your ERP suite. And there are very sound reasons for doing this, just as there are bad political or cultural ones that have, for the past decade, urged companies to move to Oracle and Unix and away from OS/400. Nonetheless, these past IDC ERP studies are not, in my opinion, accurate comparisons of modern OS/400, Windows, and Unix shops, which are dealing with complex and cranky software that is very expensive to acquire and support. My educated guess is that you spend the least amount of money, in the long run, on the platform you know best, regardless of what platform it is or what the theoretical cost disparity between the platforms is. (Some day, I will prove that, and when I do, I want a law named after me. Prickett Morgan's Law has a nice ring to it, I think.)

Making the economic case for Wintel and Lintel server consolidation on the iSeries is not, however, a no-brainer. There are technical and economic issues with which companies have to reckon. You can get the current IDC report, which is titled The ROI of Windows and Linux Server Consolidation on IBM eServer iSeries, by going to www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/conslt/idc_roi/. We've been over the benefits of the IxS, IxA, and Linux partitions lots of times in our sister publication, The Four Hundred, so I am not going to preach to the choir about it now. If you are unfamiliar with these concepts, IDC lays them out nicely in the report's introduction.

This particular study is based on somewhat thin data, with in-depth interviews involving only six companies being the foundation for the economic statistics presented. These six companies were pulled from a larger list of customers given by IBM to IDC for the purposes of doing interviews. The companies had fewer than 1,000 employees. Four were from the US, one from Australia, one from Europe. Four were consolidating Windows platforms onto the IxS or IxA, two were consolidating onto Linux partitions on the iSeries from standalone servers. All of the companies were established OS/400 shops doing their first Wintel or Lintel consolidation within the recent past. After gathering the statistics, IDC averaged them. The average of the six came to 725 employees, annual revenue of $270 million, and an IT staff of 11. They had an average of 10 distinct workloads they needed to run. Prior to the consolidation, they had an average of 34 servers, and after, they had an average of 20 servers. These were not, as the data shows, mom and pop OS/400 shops.

But, to make the statistics more relevant to smaller companies, IDC normalized its economic findings for 100 users. What IDC found was for an average investment of $141,227 per 100 users, companies could save an average of $542,728 over the course of three years. IDC is adding in not just the operational savings that come from using the IxS for Windows or Linux partitions on the iSeries to run infrastructure workloads, but also the increased IT and end user productivity that comes from having a more reliable and stable Windows or Linux environment, which is one of the undeniable side effects of using Windows on the IxS or Linux in partitions. The big reductions, IDC found, come from not having to buy server hardware or software and from decreases in payroll associated with system administration. What IDC doesn't say--and what all of our experience shows--is that companies tend to buy new and expensive servers for new workloads, but rarely use them to full capacity. An IxS card running at 70 percent capacity is a lot less expensive than a real xSeries server running at 10 percent capacity to do the same job. Similarly, taking five percent of an iSeries machine to run a Linux partition to support, for instance, a firewall, is operationally easier and probably economically cheaper than buying a Linux server to do the same task.

Perhaps as significantly, Wintel and Lintel instances running in conjunction with the iSeries translated into 10.8 percent more uptime than the free-standing machines they replaced. The actual availability percentages for the Wintel or Lintel servers were 99.862 percent before and 99.987 percent after the consolidation. No big deal, right? Well, it isn't unless you attach money--meaning lost revenue--to downtime. For the companies surveyed, the amount of lost revenue before the consolidation from the actual downtime they experienced was estimated at $528,393 per 100 users. After the consolidation with the iSeries, that lost revenue from downtime dropped to $49,779 per 100 users. Sometimes little things mean a lot.