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Maximize Your ROI

Looking to the System i to improve your bottom line

In a perfect world, there'd be only one hardware platform and one operating system. Some might call this a monopoly (and they'd be right), but this would make life much easier for IT department personnel, who have to make sure all of their IT assets work well together.

As things are now, they have a mishmash of hardware and software, some from this vendor and some from that vendor. Unfortunately, this is a fact of IT life, and dealing with it is a necessity. After all, it's all this behind-the-scenes computing magic that helps businesses succeed in today's hyper-competitive world.

But all too often, companies have more computing assets than they need, especially when it comes to one-off PC servers, which often have woefully low utilization rates. In an IBM whitepaper, "Comparing IBM System i Annual Operating Costs in Large Enterprises", Louise Hemond-Wilson notes that Intel processor-based servers averaged just 4.07-percent utilization. Where's the ROI in such a scenario?

Companies with this type of IT environment often face a host of financial and administrative issues, cutting into profits. For example, they must hire more staff to manage all of their PC servers, back up each box separately, and pay extra for the energy they use to both power and cool them. That can send their costs spiraling, with the average annual operating cost (AOC) per used relative performance unit in the x86 world reaching $231.94. (This is based on comparisons among companies with less than $10 billion in revenue and fewer than 1,000 servers, as described in the aforementioned whitepaper.) On the other end of this spectrum is the IBM System i platform. With utilization rates reaching 41.48 percent (per Hemond-Wilson's study), the AOC per used relative performance unit is a mere $32.06.

Of course, this belies the fact that most System i datacenters are also running Windows technology-based servers. Fortunately, managers of these mixed, System i/Windows environments can save money in many ways—mainly through more robust use of their System i architecture and the inclusion of IBM BladeCenter technology. Combined, they can have an immediate impact on a company's bottom line, especially regarding its return on IT investment.

A Different Mentality

Going back to its System/38 roots, the System i platform has always offered many money-saving technologies. For example, virtualization has been around since the inception of i5/OS, and subsystems "have been enabling managing multiple jobs and processes, within a single image of the operating system, balancing processor priority and memory," says Ian Jarman, manager of System i and i5/OS product offerings. "They've always been used to separate batch and interactive transaction processing, as well as different classes of business processes and workloads." Additionally, LPARs have been part of the System i architecture for nearly a decade, enabling multiple operating-system images to run on a single server.

Other systems are increasingly adopting virtualization, but the System i virtualization technologies are much more mature, having been hardened over many years. As Jarman explains, "Not all virtualization is equal. In the case of the System i platform, the goal isn't necessarily to co-locate servers, but to actually fully integrate applications using virtualization technologies, which is what we do with subsystems."

And the System i platform does this so efficiently that it averages 5.86 workloads per server, compared with 1.21 workloads per x86 server, according to the IDC study "The Business Value of IBM System i in Midsize Business Deployments", by Jean S. Bozman and Randy Perry. "Because of this," Jarman says, "you don't have the one-server-per-workload deployment practice that is common in the Windows world, which leads to underutilized server farms with more people to manage them."

“If you're managing that one thing--that one System i --well, it's a lot easier than having to manage 30 different things.” - Ian Jarman, manager of System i and i5/0S product offerings, IBM

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