On Tuesday 03 December 2002 05:11 pm, John Summerfield wrote: > On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Phil Payne wrote: > > > > $13K is a problem to most consulting companies ?? Surely not - maybe > > > > most of the one-person consulting companies, but for anything of eg. > > > > 10 people and up, would $13K really represent a problem ? > > > > > > Is that per consultant? > > > > I played with z/Flex - the zArchitecture version of Flex-ES - on an > > 850MHz ThinkPad. > > > > We got three z/OS TSO sessions going in ARCHLVL=2 with negligible trivial > > TSO response time - a logon by any one session caused about a > > three-second performance hit. For general development, I suspect four to > > six users on a 1.4GHz xSeries would be very practical. > > > > Oh - when we did this, we were sitting at the cocktail bar in a Virgin > > Atlantic Jumbo at 34,000 feet. > > And if you have it out of the office demonstrating to a client (as > someone else mentioned), what then do the others use?
We have an xSeries tower and a ThinkPad laptop. Leave the tower in the office connected via VPN and it pretty much covers anyone that has connectivity to the Internet. Earlier this year we were developing a custom application using just the tower system. TSO response was almost always excellent. Responsiveness for Telnet connections varied based on activity. With 2 people compiling C++ programs at the same time, the server became unusable to anyone not using TSO. Telnet was so slow we had to switch to doing a lot of unit testing under Windows. Even FTP would be unresponsive during peak loads. Of course, this was because we only had a single engine and we all know how resources can be tied up that way. The laptop works for demonstrations, but isn't very practical for development. Can't really use any GUI tools. The hard disk doesn't have enough space left to install very many Linux utilities. Works OK as a portable zSeries server if you also carry a router around, but then you have to carry two laptops instead of just one. Bigger/fast laptops will soon take care of these issues too. Neither one is very useful without a systems programmer around. How many consulting/ISV companies can afford a $13,000 laptop for each consultant/developer? And enough system programming support to actually make them useful? BTW, each of these machines has to be (separately) justified to IBM annually to maintain the PID software license. -- John Maenpaa Yevich, Lawson and Associates www.ylassoc.com
