How Does the iSeries Stack Up Against Unix Servers?

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Unix market sprang to life right beside the proprietary midrange server market in the late 1980s, and very quickly Unix came to dominate the server market because of the move to open standards and the competitive pricing among myriad Unix vendors. Unix is still the dominant commercial platform in the world--even though Windows is growing fast and Linux is coming of age even more rapidly--and any server platform has to keep pace with Unix to live, much less to thrive. That goes for the revamped iSeries, too.

The iSeries and its predecessor, the AS/400, have some technical advantages over Unix platforms, mainly since IBM developed a single 12-way "Raven" server product line, powered by the "Apache" 64-bit PowerPC processors, for both its OS/400 and AIX Unix platforms in 1997. IBM followed with multiple generations of AS/400 and RS/6000 platforms, including the 12-way "Blackbird," and 24-way "Condor" and 32-way "Regatta-H" server platforms, which used various Power processors and supported OS/400, AIX, and, more recently, Linux. IBM's Unix servers are as good as anything that Sun Microsystems (the market leader in the entry Unix space, and a dominant supplier of big Unix boxes) and Hewlett-Packard (the dominant supplier of midrange Unix equipment to customers very much like the iSeries base) can put in the field. I've always said that the engineers in the AS/400 Rochester Labs saved IBM's cookies in Unix, and not the other way around, but the fact remains that the AS/400 and the iSeries benefit from being perceived as having the same hot technology as IBM's Unix server line.

IBM, of course, is not publicly interested in making any comparisons between members of its eServer product line, because technical comparisons invite economic comparisons that do not always make IBM's profit makers (the iSeries and the zSeries) look as good as its shipment leaders (the pSeries and the xSeries) in the eServer line. An uneducated consumer is IBM's best customer, I guess, but that's why guys like me have a job. IBM has done a little math, comparing iSeries and Unix servers before the January 20 revamping of the iSeries line. This information was shared with business partners, not with customers. You can see a table outlining the comparison between the iSeries and an unnamed Unix server family running DB2 (presumably it is the pSeries) by clicking here.

As you can see from the table, if you look at base servers--which IBM has always internally called the central electronics complex, or CEC--even the revamped iSeries line does not look so good when compared with the Unix servers at list price. And the situation doesn't improve much when looking at minimum working configuration prices for the iSeries and Unix machines, which were set up with four disk drives and enough main memory to be useful. This is not surprising, since the iSeries line includes the DB2/400 relational database configured on it, and Unix hardware from IBM, HP, Sun, and others does not include a DBMS integrated with those vendors' respective AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, and other Unix variants. But, lo and behold, when you configure a DB2 for Unix database on Unix servers in IBM's iSeries and Unix comparison, in some cases the base working configuration of the iSeries actually beat the Unix alternative, presumably at roughly equal performance.

I like tables like the one IBM built, but I also like to do my own work and to be specific when I make comparisons. I have built my own competitive analysis table just to do a reality check on IBM's numbers and because of the vagueness of IBM's own data. I only picked three sizes of machines--two-ways, four-ways, and eight-ways--because these are the core midrange machines that everyone buys. I made my own estimates of the performance of these resulting machines, too, something that IBM's comparison lacked. I also only stacked up the iSeries against the Unix server lines from IBM and Sun, the two trend setters in the Unix market. A much more exhaustive comparison could be made, of course, including HP, but HP doesn't provide list prices to the public or online configurators. This is bad behavior on the part of HP, and I do not condone it, of course. Suffice it to say, my experience with HP's Unix machines shows that, at list prices, they are generally more pricey than IBM's AIX boxes. (HP has a pseudo-captive Unix base of ERP users, and it can largely get away with this in its installed base, and discount like crazy in competitive situations.) Anyway, the comparisons I made will give you another gauge of how the iSeries stacks up against Unix servers. I do, of course, think my own work is more detailed and accurate.

First of all, I have provided pricing for both the standard and enterprise editions of OS/400 for the iSeries machines, so you can see the cost of green-screen processing and how it compares with Unix servers. I made the best comparisons I could, given the different configurations vendors make available. I think that a base machine with 1 GB per processor and two 36 GB disk drives is sufficient, but in some cases the base machine from IBM or Sun comes with more memory or more disk that that. Instead of putting DB2 on the Unix machines, which is a bear and a half to configure, I added perpetual licenses of Oracle9i Standard Edition on two-way or four-way Unix servers and the Enterprise Edition on eight-way Unix servers. Oracle charges $15,000 per processor for Oracle9i Standard Edition and $40,000 per processor for Enterprise Edition. None of the comparisons include discounts from list price, which are rampant in the Unix market.

As you will see from my table, the iSeries Model 810 two-way server configured with OS/400 Standard Edition offers better price/performance than IBM's own pSeries 610 and 620 machines in the same power class, and is only moderately more expensive than Sun's Sun Fire 280R server. The Enterprise Edition is totally out of whack with these Unix machines, however. Even if customers were compelled to put Oracle's Enterprise Edition on these machines, the iSeries with OS/400 Enterprise Edition is still roughly twice as expensive as the Unix platform.

On four-way configurations, the iSeries Model 825 with Standard Edition costs $171,388, yielding just under $4 per transaction. The Sun Fire V480 (which does not support Sun's dynamic domain partitioning) costs less than half as much, and IBM's four-way pSeries 630 costs almost exactly half as much as the Model 825. The Model 825 with the Enterprise Edition of OS/400 costs $9.60 per TPM--that's 2.5 times the cost of the Standard Edition machine--and is not even in the same ballpark as the Unix boxes. Sun has recently discontinued sales of its eight-way Sun Fire 3800 machine, which supports two domain partitions, so I did not add it in the four-way comparison. IBM's pSeries 630 supports four logical partitions, and is at least comparable in function to the iSeries Model 825. The Model 825 can, however, expand to six processors, and clearly has much more sophisticated partitioning.

On eight-way machines, the revamped Standard Edition of the iSeries line appears to be competitive woth Unix boxes, but once again the same Model 870 machine running OS/400 Enterprise Edition is two or three times as expensive as comparable Unix boxes and the iSeries Standard Edition machine itself. Again, remember that the Sun Fire V880 server does not support dynamic domain partitioning, and it does not support the latest 1.2 GHz UltraSparc-III processors, either. A reasonably discounted Sun Fire 4800, which supports four domains, is a better investment. Everybody should buy a box that supports logical partitions of some kind at this point in the IT game. It's silly not to, especially when you can make the server maker jump through hoops in this sluggish economy.

That brings me to my last point. In 2000 and early 2001, IBM was giving away Unix boxes into accounts controlled by Sun and HP, at 45 percent of list. Sun was giving 15 percent discounts at the low end of its line and 40 percent discounts at the midrange and high end of its line to try to defend against this. HP's discounts ranged from 25 to 40 percent across its line, depending on how hot the deal was. List prices in the Unix market have come down a lot since then, so the discounting level has abated some. But in competitive Unix deals, a 25 percent discount is not asking for much. That's what happens when more than one supplier can run the same database and applications: competition. On the iSeries, customers are lucky to get 10 percent off, which is what happens when there isn't any competition. So here's my advice: Even though you have no intention of bringing in Unix--unless you are looking at a Model 825--talk and walk like you do, and push IBM to give you pricing that is consistent with the market. Knowledge is power, but only if you use it when making deals.

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