The Four Hundred

Several weeks ago, I compared the new iSeries line and Unix servers from IBM and Sun Microsystems to give you an idea of where the new iSeries stands. This week, I am comparing the new iSeries to the Windows platform, and once again I see validation of a trend I first saw developing a decade ago: For a given OLTP workload, mainframes are twice as expensive as OS/400 and Unix servers, which are themselves twice as expensive as Wintel servers.

This trend is not some sort of freak accident. It is there as a combination of design and necessity. Intel-based servers have been a relatively high-volume product since the early 1990s, and Intel has been aggressively pursuing volumes to drive out other chip makers. It has garnered 90 percent of server shipments at this point, which is stunning. Intel and the other component suppliers who comprise the hardware behind the Intel server platform have made a conscious decision to compete on price against Unix and proprietary solutions, and they have done an incredible job of just staying alive living on such thin margins. Similarly, Microsoft, which has monopoly control over corporate and personal desktop machines, has made a choice to price its server software--particularly operating systems and databases--lower than the available alternatives. Unix and proprietary server makers have dropped their prices to compete with the onslaught of Windows, as well as to compete with one another, and this has driven the Wintel duopoly to react accordingly. Some people (mostly customers) call this progress; some call it suicide (mostly vendors other than Intel and Microsoft). This is just the inevitable consequence of Intel and Microsoft having monopolies, with which they can finance a hostile takeover of the server market, and given the way capitalism works (might makes right), I just call it inevitable until some outside force gives Intel and Microsoft a sharp jolt. The advent of Linux might give Microsoft the kind of heat it has been bringing to bear on other midrange server makers in the past decade, for instance. Intel seems more in control of its own destiny now, but Advanced Micro Devices is having another go at Intel, with its 32-bit Athlon and 64-bit Opteron processors, which will debut April 22. If Linux takes off on AMD servers, the trend I characterized above might add another line: For a given OLTP workload, mainframes are twice as expensive as OS/400 and Unix servers, which are themselves twice as expensive as Wintel servers, which are twice as expensive as Linamd servers. (I just made that up, and I admit it is not that clever.)

Anyway, back to comparing modern iSeries and Windows servers. Take a look at this table I built comparing two-, four-, and eight-way machines. For the iSeries machines, I had to make my own estimates of their OLTP performance based on IBM's relative performance metrics (which are loosely based on the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark). I chose Hewlett-Packard as the Wintel server supplier, since its ProLiant machines are still the volume leader worldwide for Wintel machines. Pricing and configuration of Wintel servers from Dell, IBM, and others might differ a bit, but they tend to cluster together on price and performance. The performance of the three HP ProLiant servers in my comparison comes straight out of recent TPC-C benchmark tests. Pricing for IBM and HP servers comes right off their Web sites as of last Friday, and pricing for Microsoft's Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 operating systems and SQL Server databases (which come in different editions) come from Microsoft's Web site or, in the case of Windows 2003 Server Datacenter Edition, from TPC-C documents.

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 to Windows servers. I made the best comparisons I could, given the many different configurations vendors make available. While I added perpetual licenses of Oracle9i Standard Edition on two- or four-way Unix servers and the Enterprise Edition on eight-way Unix servers a few weeks ago, Microsoft is the volume leader on the Wintel platform, so I didn't configure the Wintel machines with Oracle databases. I also ruled out IBM's DB2 Universal DataBase (UDB) for the same reason, not to mention that its pricing is a pain to work out. None of the comparisons include discounts from list price, just like in the iSeries-Unix comparison from a few weeks ago.

Both the iSeries and the Unix servers can be sold with operating systems and database licenses for an unlimited number of users. While Microsoft offers per processor licensing on SQL Server 2000--$4,999 per CPU for the Standard Edition and $19,999 per CPU for the Enterprise Edition--both Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 still have a per-user Client Access License (CAL) fee. This is $40 per user at list price. Guessing the number of users that are appropriate on a given machine is difficult, so I decided to take the easy way out and divide the number of actual TPC-C users on the tested ProLiant machines by 100, figuring that real workloads are not tuned by the world's best performance experts with unlimited budget and users don't type continuously like simulated users can. (The funny thing is, on the two-, four-, and eight-way ProLiants, this worked out to 220, 620, and 920 users without rounding. An odd coincidence.)

The comparison on OLTP workloads between iSeries machines running OS/400 V5R2 Standard Edition and Wintel boxes running Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 is right about where I expected. No shock, no awe. I am just happy that Standard Edition has kept the two-to-one ratio, to be honest, and that is why I was so pleased to see the January 20 announcements and reacted with--how shall I say it?--such enthusiasm. That said, I still want IBM to sell the iSeries at the same price/performance as Wintel boxes, and I showed the company how it might do this in my iDeal iSeries feature stories last year. But I don't expect IBM to adopt such ideas quickly, if at all.

As for the large disparity between Wintel prices and iSeries servers running OS/400 Enterprise Edition, this is again to be expected of a company that wants to bolster server profits on the iSeries as much as possible so it can slash the costs of xSeries and pSeries machines to compete in those cut-throat markets and not go broke. As I said last year, this is not an inevitability--IBM can and still could change things to really make the OS/400 platform more competitive with Wintel machines--but it is a conscious choice IBM has made. I suppose we are supposed to be grateful that IBM slashed the cost of 5250 processing capacity with the revamping of the iSeries line, but it does make customers either take all the capacity or nothing and WebFace their RPG applications to avoid that old green-screen tax. It may look like IBM is trying to drive customers to move off the iSeries, but I sometimes think that IBM just figures these companies are locked in and they will just pay that high price for software. As has been the case with 10 prior generations of AS/400 and iSeries machines, we're going to find out the hard way when OS/400 shops take out their checkbooks for iSeries or Wintel gear, or for something else entirely. Say what you will, but the OS/400 market is never dull.

One last thing: These comparisons between iSeries, Unix, and now Windows machines assume that the box is going full-out doing database processing. That is, after all, what the TPC-C test is doing. But iSeries and Unix customers run many different workloads on their machines concurrently, not just a database. They have sophisticated workload managers that not only make this possible but also push processor utilization into the 70 percent or higher range. A Windows server cannot, without virtual machine partitioning supplied by VMware or soon Microsoft, run multiple workloads very well or get utilization anywhere near as high. This is why companies tend to put one Windows workload on one Windows server. This is why Wintel servers are less costly. In some ways, they are less useful and less sophisticated. Windows NT was the brainchild of the former hot-shot OS programmer from Digital, Dave Cutler, who was offered the chance to create what amounts to a Windows-compatible version of DEC's VMS operating system, and Microsoft had to buy Connectix a few months ago to get virtual-machine partitioning for Windows, which it hopes to ship this week. Microsoft has 20 years of catch up to do on this front, and it is not particularly good at this kind of innovation.