I think you're underestimating the amount of manpower/time it would take to migrate some legacy applications. Think more along the lines of 2+ years, and several dozen programmers. Now multiply that by half a dozen or so legacy applications. Suddenly virtualization isn't that bad of an option.

In all fairness, try finding -anything- specific at ibm.com. I've wasted entire days trying to find a download link for specific versions of websphere.

I think GP was referring to this: http://failblog.org/2010/01/10/avatar-plot-fail/

[Citation Needed]

Call me crazy, but I'd call the time from powering on the machine to arriving at a usable UI a pretty good definition of booting.

That might be because OS X is from the BSD side of the family tree, not the System V side. It's not _supposed_ to be SVR4, or even like it. Both SysV and BSD are descendants of Unix, just with different heritage.

Raid 5 isn't necessarily any more reliable than using a single drive for backup. If drives are from the same batch (as they are likely to be if you purchase a couple at a time), it is extremely likely that they will fail at around the same time. Recently, I've had that happen. 2 drives dying within a 5 hour period will quite happily wipe out your entire "secure" raid array.