Right, they are. But they are one or the other, not both. So $25K a piece for a pair of FICON. And $25K a piece for a pair of FCP.
That is, if you need to run both mainframe and scsi attached devices. And then, you have the cost on the dasd side. One dasd subsystem with FICON. Another DASD subsystem with FCP. Or a box that can be LPARed with both FICON and FCP connections. At the decision point, where we replace our processor and dasd, adding FCP was just additional cost in which we wouldn't actually see any benefit. That may change in the future, but in July 2005, it was just additional cost. I'm not knocking FCP. I can see it as being a lower overhead connection. But the cost/benefit just wasn't there, yet. Our older VSE/ESA 2.3 systems wouldn't be able to use it unless we converted all VSE dasd from CKD to FBA. Just not worth the hassle for VSE systems that should be migrated to VSE/ESA 2.7 and above over the next 2 years. Tom Duerbusch THD Consulting >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 3/17/2006 12:19 PM >>> That's strange. I thought the FCP and FICON adapters were one in the same with different microcode. The IOCDS setting of TYPE=FCP (?) was what caused the different microcode to be loaded. There are different FICON cards though aren't there? FICON Express etc. I wonder if this was the difference. -----Original Message----- One other facet to this discussion....cost On the z/890, the FICON adapters were $25K each. The FCP adapters were $25K each. Then, you need the adapters on the storage unit. We went to an IBM DS6800. The Business Partner was somewhat pushing the FCP adapters for our growing Linux workload. The DS6800 would be LPARed into a FICON attached side for CKD data, and a FCP side for scsi attached access. I took one look at the cost and couldn't justify, at this time, FCP. We can always add it in the future. And I expect when we replace the z/890, FCP will be just one of those "standard" things. Yep, would still be optional, but everyone orders it.
