Slashdot Flamefest Pits the iSeries Against Windows

Published: January 23, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you have some time and you want to see what the open source intelligentsia--and I use that latter word somewhat sarcastically-- is thinking about the iSeries and how it stacks up against Windows, you might want to check out this posting on the Slashdot Web site. A Slashdot reader called Rabid Cougar explained that he is a system admin for a small manufacturing company that has an ERP system that runs on an IBM AS/400, but that this ERP system is out of gas and needs to be upgraded. Rabid Cougar asked the Slashdot community what they would do: Pick an iSeries ERP system, or move to a Windows ERP system?

The responses Rabid Cougar got are illustrative of the benefits and the challenges that the OS/400 platform faces. I particularly liked this one: "AS/400s are some of the lowest TCO systems on the planet. My wife worked at a place that used an AS/400 system bought in 1989. When she told me about it I laughed, until we realized that the machine had nearly a decade of uptime with about 30 users hitting it every day and no IT staff of any kind. The machine eventually had to be rebooted when a hard disk died and the machine phoned home. . . an IBM guy showed up to replace it and nobody knew that there was a problem. The system was replaced about 18 months ago (because spare parts were no longer available) by an Windows/Oracle system that is complete garbage. Bugs in the IBM eSeries [xSeries] lights-out-management card caused the system to reboot every 60 minutes. Things like restoring backups are also much more complicated and error prone. On the AS/400, restoring the system from bare metal required you to insert the tape into the drive and holding down a function key."

The observation I liked best was this: In the past, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, and now, today, nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft; but nobody gets ulcers for buying an iSeries. Why this and other similar, sensible comments are not part of an iSeries marketing campaign is something I cannot fathom. By the way, the Slashdot community came down heavily on the side of sticking with a legacy solution because, let's face it, Unix and its baby brother, Linux, are legacy solutions, too.