IBM i platform is best suited for transaction-based and data warehousing applications. IBM i has proved its high availability and continuity for core banking applications. Since IBM i provides a single server solution for the back end to the front end, it is a simple and efficient system for a business to bring up their application live.
RHEL is excellent for environments that do not have any specific compliance requirements, as everything works great out of the box without any additional options being needed. However, if additional compliance options are required (such as PCI-DSS or HIPAA), there are many hardening options available out of the box. Some scenarios where RHEL would not be appropriate are for environments or organizations that heavily rely on DEB or APT packages, such as Ubuntu systems.
It's not necessarily Rail specifically. It's stuff that you guys provide with rail like a satellite and insights are very useful and it really helps set it apart from other flavors of Linux, especially with insights, what you guys have now on the cloud version of it, we've been talking with our account rep for a while on things we can get out of it as compared to what it used to be, which is hosted internally in our company. It's very promising. I'm actually kind of excited about it. Help resolve a big pain point with the security department.
I've heard issues about the manifest sinking can be a pain sometimes and when you're going from an older to a newer version, sometimes the manifests can get messed up and you have to start all over again. That can be a bang. But mostly for me, I don't like typing a lot. So trying to remember on the playbooks it's plain English of what you want to do, but you still have to remember where every little bracket and every little thing goes and that's kind of annoying. So the coating aspect of it when you don't like coating is kind of a thing, but that's changing I think.
RHEL has most of the features that are required by an ERP solution. If you need any additional packages, RHEL has a great repository and a very easy package installation/upgrade process.
Red Hat support has really come a long way in the last 10 years, The general support is great, and the specialized product support teams are extremely knowledgeable about their specific products. Response time is good and you never need to escalate.
IBM i platform is single shop solution for multiple business requirements. Its database architecture and security options made it dependable among multiple business domain entities. IBM i is IBM's well-told and well-known system. IBM i is popular in companies in the manufacturing and supply chain business. Thanks to IBM that it kept IBM i (AS400) ever-evolving so far.
The biggest thing about RHEL that makes it stand out for enterprise users is the support that we get from the vendor. Whereas with the other ones, you're basically left on your own. There's no official repo, there's no satellite for patching. You're very left on your own with the community.
We can get things rolled out very quickly and in a hybrid cloud environment for the tool systems, that's really important. And once we go to OpenShift, then we're going to start doing bare metal deploys. I'm assuming that its track record's going to stay because you need reliability and you need something that's going to be able to handle what you're going to give it. So that's an assumption on my part.
