> Speeding up the mainframe machines to at least match the toy machines would really >make our jobs a lot easier when we're trying to sell the mainframe concept.
I think you're trying to sell the wrong thing. The first time I hit this was back in the mid-1970s. We'd designed a mainframe IMS database to run FORTRAN transactions against time series economic data for financial modelling, and justified a 370/158 as the host. Our capacity plan gave us a staged growth pattern and upgrades were planned. All of a sudden our curve died and CPU usage plummeted - so we convened a meeting. It turned out they'd bought a raft of Hewlett-Packard technical calculators and were running their "what-ifs" on those. When they got close, they'd go back to the mainframe. They could each load their personal 3KB or so of data and play for hours. These were the early LED display devices, so you HAD to have the mains power plugged in! It's always been the way. Mainframes have NEVER stacked up as cheap sources of compute power, and were only used for that purpose when the problem was too big for any other approach. You have to concentrate on the mainframe's unique selling propositions. In the Linux world, for instance, the speed with which a new server can be created and the ease with which it can be managed. Show that as a cost-of-ownership advantage, and the comparatively huge extra cost of mainframe MIPS is so small as an absolute quantity that it almost gets lost in the rounding errors. But get yourself cornered into instructions-per-transaction or some other wholly artificial benchmark and you've lost before you begin. -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.com +44 7785 302 803 +49 173 6242039
