Advantages

Windows environment on iSeries™ provides most of the capabilities of running Microsoft® Windows on a PC-based server and provides the following advantages over other computer systems.

Space savings

• There are fewer pieces of hardware to manage requiring less physical space.

Greater accessibility and protection for your data

• An integrated Windows server uses iSeries disk storage, which is generally more reliable than PC server hard disks.
• You have access to faster iSeries tape drives for integrated server backups.
• You can back up the entire Windows server as part of your iSeries server backup. This allows you to recover a failed server much faster and easier than with typical file level recovery from Windows.
• Integrated servers implicitly take advantage of superior data protection schemes which exist in i5/OS™ such as RAID or drive mirroring.
• Typical integrated server configurations have storage space data spread across more iSeries disk drives than would be configured in stand-alone (non-integrated) Windows server installations. This can frequently provide better peak disk I/O capacity, since each server is not constrained to few dedicated drives.
• You can add additional disk storage to integrated servers without shutting down the server.
• It is possible to gain access to DB2® UDB for iSeries data through an enhanced Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) device driver using iSeries Access. This device driver enables server-to-server applications between integrated servers and i5/OS.
• You have the ability to use an integrated server as a second tier in a three-tier client/server application.
• Virtual networking does not require additional LAN hardware and provides communications between iSeries logical partitions, Integrated xSeries® Servers (IXSs), Integrated xSeries Adapters (IXAs), and iSCSI HBAs.

Simplified administration

• User parameters, such as passwords, are easier to administer from i5/OS. You can create users and groups and enroll them from i5/OS to integrated servers. This makes updating passwords and other user information from i5/OS easy.
• Your computer system is less complicated thanks to the integration of user administration function, security, server management, and backup and recovery plans between the i5/OS and Microsoft Windows environments. You can save your integrated server data on the same media as other i5/OS data and restore individual files as well as i5/OS objects.

Remote management and problem analysis

• You can sign on to i5/OS from a remote location and shut down or restart your integrated server.
• Since you can mirror integrated server event log information to i5/OS you can remotely analyze Microsoft Windows errors.

xSeries server attached with an Integrated xSeries Adapter (IXA) or iSCSI HBA

• You have considerably more flexibility in configuring a full size xSeries than you have in configuring an IXS, an xSeries on a card.
• Full size xSeries models are released more often, meaning that you can get the most up-to-date Intel® processors and other hardware.
• More PCI feature cards are available for full size xSeries servers than for IXSs.

IBM® BladeCenter™ server attached via an iSCSI host bus adapter

• Dense IBM BladeCenter packaging
• New IBM BladeCenter models are released more frequently than IXS.

Multiple servers

• Microsoft Cluster service allows you to connect multiple servers into server clusters. Server clusters provide high-availability and easy manageability of data and programs running within the cluster.
• Without using LAN hardware, servers and logical partitions running on the same iSeries have high-performance, secure virtual networking communications.
• You can run multiple integrated servers on a single iSeries. Not only convenient and efficient, this also gives you the ability to easily switch to another up-and-running server if the hardware fails.
• If you have multiple integrated servers installed on your iSeries, you can define their Windows domain roles in a way that will simplify user enrollment and access. For example, you might want to set up one of these servers as a domain controller. Then you only have to enroll users to the domain controller and users can log on from any Microsoft Windows machine on that domain.
• An iSeries server's optical and tape drives can be shared with integrated servers running on the iSeries.

Hot spare support

• Server integration and storage virtualization provide innovative options that can enhance the reliability and recoverability of the Windows server environment.
• If the Windows server hardware fails, you can quickly and easily switch the server's configuration to another hot spare xSeries server or IBM BladeCenter server without restarting your iSeries server. This may reduce the overall number of PC servers needed to provide increased availability.
• Hot spare support also adds flexibility by enabling one spare server to be used to protect multiple production servers.