LSF on Windows OR LSF on Unix ?

Hi Vijay.

For compute nodes, probably the most important factor is the customer application. Customer application aside, the most common OS is Linux on Intel. LSF has more features on that platform.

--Mike

but, rest assured, that is NOT true of LSF.

There was a survey about 10 years ago, and the breakdown was something along these lines:
38% AIX
25% Windows
Rest was HPUX, Solaris, iSeries.
There was no Linux release publically available at that time.

Now I suspect that the Windows number is closer to 40% now, with iSeries in a stable to slow decline (I'd say about 10-12%), and AIX about 45%. I know Linux has no more than 25 clients, with no more than 10 live, so it'll be a long time before it's considered a significant *nix port for LSF. In fact, due to the eventual demise of LSF in v11, I don't see a mass adoption of Linux, such that it will be a significant platform for LSF.

Now with Landmark, once Linux is officially supported (it may be as of this writing, but wasn't as of my last check in March), I see Linux becoming a significant platform, especially among the Infor non-S3 clients, how need to adopt S3.

Kwane

I believe Kwane's numbers are fairly accurate.

I have been on AIX (multiple times), Solaris, and Windows. I have been through one platform change and am going through another. The biggest drive for the platform change was server support. The first time I went through the platform change, the organization was a Windows shop. It made a lot of sense switching from AIX to Windows especially when I think back to all of the struggles I had trying to get Windows security resources to do AIX security for the few IDs we had to add each year.

The biggest issues we had were 1) getting our Unix scripts converted especially the ones with awk in them as our team were not Windows developers, 2) getting used the the IDs being converted to NT######, and 3) getting a knowledgeable resource from Lawson Professional Services to be able to connect our Windows server to an AIX database. I think the 3rd issue is really not an issue these days.

I think if I had been trained in Process Flow at the time of the first platform change, I would have converted many of the Unix scripts to Process Flow instead of using VB, Perl, VBScript, bat files, or any other non-Lawson solution.

I was very skeptical that the system would run well, but I was pleasantly surprised that it ran faster. It could have been the upgrade from 8 to 9.01 or the fact that our AIX servers were about 15 years old.

Thanks All, When I attended Lawson Administration training at Colorado Springs couple of months back, My instructor told me that iSeries customer base is slowly dwindling, he also told that Unix and Windows are equally popular but slowly Window based installations are getting more popular and clients are moving away from Unix to Windows. He advised me to concentrate more on Landmark as it is going to be the future. He simply gave an example that if you want automations (Process Flows) on Lawson S3 V10, you need to be a federated system. It means that on V10 even if one is not using any Landmark application, S3 still needs to be be coupled with Landmark if someone wants to use Process Flows.

Everything you were told is basically accurate. I think there will be an ultimate leveling out of the platforms where AIX is at about 35%-40%, windows at about 35-40%, Linux at 15%-20% everything else 5%-10%, so long as the Linux port of Landmark in v11 isn't botched.

You'll see some clients go all windows, since everyone will end up with a windows server serving up sharepoint, unless in v11 Infor reverses its position on a Microsoft-centric presentation layer

As for focusing on Landmark, this is the most valuable advice you'll get so long as your career remains Infor-centric.

As for iSeries, it's a shame, as it's a great platform, but IBM itself backed away from the object oriented paradigm to focus on FOSS platforms and virtualization. The other reason, is most clients learned that they really didn't need true 24/7 reliability for a system they use for back office. Since S3 doesn't include a point of sale system, a clinical system, or a loan accrual module, most clients don't see the need for it to have nearly uninterrupted uptime.