On Thu, 16 Oct 2008 09:55:25 -0500, Rich Smrcina <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>John McKown wrote: >> >> Thanks for the correction. But, from your comments, I would take it that the >> System z is simply not worth using, except for z/OS (maybe z/VSE) legacy >> work. If this is true, then I see no reason why any company would get a z >> for new work. And, if a company could move its workload from, say, CICS to >> WAS, it would be less expensive to run that work on Intel. > >It makes you think that his purpose in life is to trash System z, at least by the tone >of his posts. This should not be the purpose of this list. > >-- > >Rich Smrcina I never really got that impression from him. I think he is just relating his experiences with the current "problems" in the z arena. I still think that z/Linux under z/VM will outperform non-CPU, high I/O intensive, workloads better than Linux/Intel. I've had some people indicate that the "enterprise" level Intel servers can approach the z's I/O rate. But I am unsure. One thing that I do know is that the z hardware is more reliable and recoverable. However, that said, many companies may regard the current Intel as "good enough". And today "good enough" is superior to "best" to most managers. As an example. We were looking at moving our z/OS workload to an Intel server farm (starting with 4 systems as I vaguely recall). I asked about what happened if one of the 8 CPUs in a server "died". The response was that Windows would recover (not crash), but that the current work running on that CPU would die and need to be restarted. I compared that to when a CP on our z890 "died". Another CP took over the in-flight work with absolutely NO impact to anything. In fact, if EREP and the HMC had not told us that a CP had died, we never would have known. The same when one of our OSAs "died". The other OSA transparently took over. Shocked the <elided> out of the "open" people that we didn't lose any connectivity or even any IP sessions. But companies generally just don't seem to want to pay for that level of reliability. -- John ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
