Media Metrix (www.mediametrix.com) specializes in Internet and digital media measurement. Every month, Media Metrix ranks the top digital media/Web properties, Web sites, and other Web categories by the number of unique visitors they received during the month (i.e., the actual number of people who visited each location). Each visitor is counted only once in the final totals, no matter how often that person visited a location. Visitor measurements are a powerful analysis tool because they measure unduplicated audience reach, as opposed to user sessions and page views, which include multiple visits to each site by the same viewer.
Windows IIS Soup Is Good Food
In Media Metrix’s December 1999 report, the consolidation of all Microsoft sites placed third in the category of top digital media/Web properties with 40.4 million unique visitors. In the Web sites category, msn.com was the second most popular site with 32.7 million unique visitors, microsoft.com was number four with 25.4 million visitors, and number ten, passport.com, received 15.9 million visitors.
This report means that Microsoft has an enormous Web presence that runs on the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS). If you’re wondering how Microsoft manages such an enormous Web presence, go to its Backstage Web page (www.microsoft.com/backstage), which documents how Microsoft operates one of the largest Web sites.
This is all very interesting, but here’s the point: Microsoft believes enough in its own technology that it risks a high-volume business on software that is frequently considered unproven and unstable. While it’s popular for the AS/400 community to turn its nose up at Microsoft, you can’t argue with success. IIS works. Microsoft is doing a big- time IIS walk, and that’s a strong argument for the appropriateness of using Microsoft products as a Web server platform.
And Therein Lies the Sting....
Now, accepting the idea that Microsoft products can handle high-volume e-business sites, the question is this: How does Microsoft IIS compare to the AS/400 for Web serving?
In terms of capabilities, the two platforms are evenly matched. The AS/400 offers most of the features you need for e-business, including the HTTP Server for AS/400, WebSphere, Java support, digital certificates, and more. And if you don’t like IBM’s offerings, there are many third-party vendors that also provide AS/400 Web serving solutions. IIS possesses the same capabilities, and the third-party provider market is much larger. Either platform can do the job.
So, how do you decide between the AS/400 and Microsoft IIS for Web serving? Consider these three key areas:
• Reliability and scalability—It’s difficult to argue against the AS/400 on the reliability point. Also, on an individual server basis, Microsoft does not scale as well as a single AS/400.
However, several Microsoft IIS servers can be clustered together to provide high availability and load balancing. Relying on clustering for scalability is a strength because, in a high-volume, 24/7 e-business operation, you need to be running multiple clustered servers to ensure continuous availability. The AS/400 also provides services and APIs for certain clustering functions, but you must buy additional software from third-party High Availability Business Partners (HABPs) to take advantage of that capability. This adds extra cost to your environment, and the AS/400’s clustering focus seems to be more on availability than on load balancing.
• Pricing—Here, Microsoft IIS has a big advantage. I did a rough comparison of the hardware costs of setting up a Microsoft IIS Web server vs. an AS/400. I retrieved a quote for a Dell 500 MHz dual-processor Pentium with 512 MB RAM, dual 9 GB hard drives, network cards, and Windows NT under $5,000. When I retrieved basic AS/400 prices from the IBM AS/400 Configuration Station home page (www.as400.ibm.com/configure/welcome.htm), a similarly configured basic AS/400 e- server 150 costs over $12,000, an e-server 170 costs over $17,000, and an e-server 720 costs over $40,000. The AS/400 prices were for basic machines without software or additional hardware, and I didn’t factor in Software Subscription, price increases, etc. So it wouldn’t surprise me if a final configured machine costs more than the rough numbers I’m presenting here.
• Programming talent—An important point about the Microsoft Web site example is that Microsoft uses Active Server Pages (ASP) to retrieve dynamic content into its Web pages. This is crucial for integrating data from back-end systems via ODBC, OLE DB, Microsoft SNA Server, or Microsoft SQL Server. ASP programmers are cheap and plentiful. In contrast, OS/400 doesn’t support ASP natively, although you can run ASP applications inside WebSphere with Halcyon Software’s Instant ASP (iASP) product. Outside of ASP, you can use Java, JavaServer Pages (JSP), Common Gateway Interface (CGI), and Net.Data for application development. However, this type of programming (especially Java talent) is more expensive to procure, so Microsoft IIS has an advantage here, too.
Summing It All Up in Under 150 Words
This comparison doesn’t mean that I think everyone should abandon the AS/400 for Web serving and go straight to running Microsoft IIS on a Windows 2000 machine. It means that, if your business applications reside on an AS/400, you are not limited to running your Web server on an AS/400. You have a choice of several server platforms, and you should choose the platform that best fits your resources, goals, budget, and personnel. If that platform happens to be Microsoft IIS, don’t worry: It will fit just fine into your AS/400 network.
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