Have you ever wanted to prove to your CFO that the iSeries could be a more cost-effective Web, mail, or file/print server than that Intel server farm down the hall? If so, then IBM may have just given you the tools you need to drive your point home.
Last week, after months of preparation, IBM quietly unveiled its TCOnow series of tools. (Their real name is TCOnow!, but I'm dropping the exclamation point to keep my grammar checker from having a heart attack.) The tools are the result of a partnership between IBM and CIOview, a consulting firm that works with IT vendors to collect information about technology expenses from hundreds of customer sites. The company's goal is to become the preeminent clearinghouse of objective information about the total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment of IT systems.
IBM is working with CIOview to create a family of tools for studying TCO that draw upon a common database of cost information and present their findings in a consistent manner. This will be a significant improvement over the mixed bag of spreadsheets and databases that IBM currently uses to conduct TCO studies. To kick off its tool overhaul, IBM announced five TCOnow modules. Here is a quick description of each module with hyperlinks to limited versions of the modules.
- An iSeries module that compares the TCO for running I/O-intensive workloads on an Integrated xSeries Server (IXS) or Integrated xSeries Adapter (IXA) versus a standalone Windows server from Dell or Hewlett-Packard (HP).
- An iSeries module that compares the TCO for running Web serving workloads on an iSeries Linux partition versus a Windows server from Dell or HP.
- An xSeries module that compares the TCO for hosting Windows applications in an xSeries partition (created using VMware ESX Server) versus a Windows server from Dell or HP.
- A pSeries module that compares the TCO for hosting ERP applications on the pSeries running AIX versus competitive Unix servers from Sun or HP.
- A zSeries module that compares costs for running infrastructure and application workloads in Linux mainframe partitions versus running the workloads on a Unix server from Sun or HP.
Customers can access the Web versions of these modules anonymously to learn more about them. If they like what they see, they can request complimentary studies from IBM. These studies use the full versions of the modules to create 70-page documents that present the TCO and business cases for the server configurations being analyzed. Each module can test a wide range of hypothetical configurations to explore various alternatives. This makes TCOnow a powerful tool for documenting the lifetime costs of various servers, including the iSeries.
If you try out the limited Web versions of the iSeries modules, you will likely find them both tantalizing and frustrating in terms of what they offer. In the iSeries IXS/IXA module, for instance, you can create scenarios that compare the TCO of the iSeries against Windows servers running file/print, LDAP, Citrix, and several other workloads. After you configure the servers via some drop-down menus, the tool creates graphs that show the TCO for each configuration over periods from three to five years. The tool then breaks those TCO figures into ten cost categories: servers, storage, software, networking, services, staff, training, facilities, support, and estimated downtime costs.
While the charts are easy to generate, creating the configurations you want to compare is a different matter. In the Web version of the IXS/IXA tool, for instance, there is no option for specifying whether you will support the workload via IXS cards or IXA cards connected to xSeries servers. Moreover, if you try to generate a TCO study for a new (versus an existing) iSeries server, you cannot specify the iSeries model. Obviously, the TCO for a new server would be quite different than that for an existing system. Finally, the tool assumes that your company is in the United States, leaving two thirds of the world's iSeries customers out in the cold.
Of course, these frustrations are meant to goad you into clicking on that "contact me" icon and revealing your interest to Big Blue. Considering the power of the full-blown TCOnow tools, however, asking IBM to contact you may be worth the sales calls you will get for doing so. After all, there's a big difference between telling your senior management that the iSeries will cost them less in the long run and showing them a 70-page report that documents that fact with comparisons of your own servers.
Lee Kroon is a Senior Industry Analyst for Andrews Consulting Group, a firm that helps mid-sized companies manage business transformation through technology. You can reach him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
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