The IBM i operating environment has a longstanding track record of maintaining extremely high levels of availability, security and disaster recovery that are – by wide margins – greater than any competitive platform. What is the value of these strengths? Few would dispute that disruption of core enterprise systems can affect the bottom line. Many organizations, however, do not factor costs of downtime into their platform selection processes. This may be a serious mistake. Business damage due to planned as well as unplanned outages may vary significantly between platforms.
This report presents two sets of three-year cost comparisons for use of IBM i, Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clusters (WSFC), and Oracle Exadata Database Machine to support core enterprise systems in six companies. Comparisons are presented for companies operating supply chains, and for financial services companies with revenues of between $1 billion and $10 billion.
Results uncovered:
Costs of downtime – i.e., business costs due to outages – averaged 90 percent less for use of IBM i than for Windows server clusters, and 71 percent less than for Oracle Exadata. This calculation is for planned outages and unplanned outages of less than three hours duration.
Lower IBM i costs of downtime translated into three-year business savings of $2.8 million to $35.3 million compared to use of clustered Windows servers, and $700,000 to $8.6 million compared to use of Oracle Exadata.
Risk exposure to severe unplanned outages of 6 to 24 hours duration is also significantly lower for use of IBM i. These calculations, which employ a standard probability/impact methodology, indicate that risks of severe business damage for use IBM i average 93 percent less than for use of clustered Windows servers and 73 percent less than for use of Oracle Exadata. These variances translated into $257,000 to $7.43 million in higher risk exposure for use of clustered Windows servers and $56,000 to $1.69 million for use of Oracle Exadata.
Comparisons are based on use of IBM i 7.1 with IBM PowerHA SystemMirror for i high availability clusters on latest-generation Power Systems; Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2 and WSFC on latest-generation Intel E5- and E7-based platforms; and current Oracle Exadata models with Oracle 11g Database including Real Application Clusters (RAC).
Lower costs of downtime and risk exposure for use of IBM i are due to fundamental differences in architecture and technology.
