We i5 Folks Got It Easy

I got the chance to attend the php|tek conference in Chicago last week and it really opened my eyes to a lot of things. You see, the event was attended mostly by members of the PHP community supporting the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP…) stack. Since I was probably the ONLY i5 guy at the event I felt a little out of place. Aside from being over dressed (I wore a collared shirt) nearly everyone I talked to had not heard of the i5. And when Andi Gutmans, Zend Founder and CTO, gave the keynote and mentioned the i5 twice, nary a head was turning. But that’s OK. Maybe next year we will see a considerable improvement in the i5 community attendance, if you catch my drift. 

The event was well attended and well done. The event organizer, Marco Tabini, did a wonderful job of putting on a great show. I have been involved in MANY user group and COMMON events and I have an idea of how much work goes in to a conference such as this. To say that Marco did a great job of making everything look easy is an understatement. He and his crew really busted their butts to pull this off and they all deserve a round of applause! Between the multiple keynotes, education sessions and evening recreational events I’d have to put this show down as a must see for any PHP’er.

Oh yeah, we got it easy…One of the sessions I attended was given by a network professional who specializes in clustering lots of little Intel boxes in order to scale PHP websites. I guess this is a cool thing for the Intel world. It involves a lot of complicated networking and servers and more. He went on and on about BGP and round robin DNS and all kinds of topics. The room was packed and the entire audience was absorbed! People really wanted to hear what this guy had to say. If only they knew. If only they were aware of the power of the Power systems like the IBM i. It was everything I could do to keep from shouting “Go get an i”! Maybe I should have. But, then again, I’d have to explain the benefit of scaling vertically vs. scaling horizontally. The benefits of having IBM on the speed dial and the fact that they can make a new machine appear out of thin air as long as your Business Partner completes the paperwork properly and on time 

When we outgrow our solution on i5, we simply pick up the phone and tell our IBM business partner we want a bigger box! The last two upgrades I did didn’t even require a tape drive. All we had to do was move the disk drives from the old machine to the new machine. And, don’t forget about business continuity. The secondary machine can handle the load while the primary is undergoing surgery. Well, I know I’m preaching to the choir. Now we just need to get the word out to the masses…

Another highlight of the conference last week was the chance to meet one of the product managers at Zend, Shahar Evron. Shahar hails from Israel and was in town for a couple of days to absorb some content from the event and chat up a few contacts. He and all the other folks at Zend have been going out of their way to make a rookie like me feel very welcome. It’s an exciting time for Zend and I’m glad to be a part of it. Oh well, looks like the honeymoon is over! Time to get back to work…