I concur with the general tenor of previous comments. It rarely makes financial sense to boost the capacity (especially significantly) of an older model when a newer model is available.
As for what the "right" capacity is, it's very hard to say based on the limited information. Users are apparently happier when there is over 4 times more capacity supporting them, so that suggests they are experiencing constraints that may be affected their productivity (and business results). What is the value of that happiness, basically? What other costs do you avoid by securing this happiness in this manner? It's very easy to look at a euro or dollar or yen number with some zeros and say, "That's big." Compared to what? For example, my company could cut its big paper bill to zero, but then we wouldn't be able to execute any contracts, so our even bigger revenue would fall to zero. Would users be just as happy or almost as happy with 3 times the capacity? 2 times? Particularly on the newer model, you have a tremendous number of capacity choices in between where you are now and 4 times. A mainframe is going to be honest with you. You can measure it, you can see the numbers. Transparency is a good thing, because it helps people make good business decisions. The trouble is, an awful lot of other things in IT and business are much less transparent. The solution is to gain more transparency over those other things., - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan / Asia-Pacific E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
