Fw: Another BIG Mainframe Bites the Dust
This one got caught on the REPLY-TO When in doubt. PANIC!! -Original Message- From: Chris Mason [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 21:03:42 To:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Another BIG Mainframe Bites the Dust Ted For those reading this who do not have English as a mother tongue and are thus unfamiliar with English culture, I'll take this opportunity to explain Hobson's choice. It helps that (a) I used to teach to an audience of European students so I have a sensitivity to idiom and the like - and - (b) I used to sing on the site where Hobson kept his horses and lived on the site of the hostelry next door. In the early seventeenth century, Thomas Hobson rented out horses from some stables near to King's College in Cambridge next door to the institution known then as Katharine Hall and the George[1] Inn. The clientele for his horses, generally university folk, used to select some horses more than others and so Hobson's stock wasn't being used to the best advantage. To ensure that his horses were not overused or underused, Hobson arranged that the freshest horse was always nearest the stable door and insisted that this horse was chosen. Hence we have the expression Hobson's choice. Today I expect Hobson would be described as a work load manager. Apparently the Katharine Hall, renamed St Catharine's, college chapel was constructed on the site of Hobson's stables as part of the mid to late seventeen century rebuilding of the institution. Chris Mason [1] Somehow the building on this site became known as The Bull. One reference mentions that Hobson also ran a coach service from Cambridge to London and that his London terminus inn was called The Bull. Bull was the name of the terrible building housing the students' rooms in my time, now happily replaced by a modern building - although, being listed, the facade has been preserved. - Original Message - From: Ted MacNEIL [EMAIL PROTECTED] Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU Sent: Tuesday, 10 October, 2006 11:58 PM Subject: Re: Another BIG Mainframe Bites the Dust ... Hobson's choice. ... -- 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
FW: Another BIG Mainframe Bites the Dust
As a follow-up to the recent Another BIG Mainframe Bites the Dust thread -- and apropos to a couple of other ongoing threads -- I received kind permission from Mr. Sangho Yoon to post on this listserv the following email he sent to me the other day. There is a lot to be ruminated upon in his note. Jon snip Hi there, I am the Sangho Yoon from Samsung Life Insurance in Korea that has been repeatedly misquoted through numerous press releases regarding our mainframe rehosting project. I was killing some time at LAX, on my way back to Seoul and I stumbled across this thread of messages regarding our project and I read it with a mix of interest, amusement, and horror. First of all, we did not embark on this project purely from a cost perspective. Of the three main criteria for our success - reliability, performance, and cost - the financial aspect was the least important. If, through our 18 months of benchmark testing of the various solutions available for rehosting, we felt that the reliability and performance was not viable, this project would have died a quiet death. Secondly, I was somewhat amused by comments regarding whether we will survive or not. Samsung Life insurance is the largest insurer in Korea, with annual revenues in excess of US$25 billion and assets of over US$100 billion. We rank among the top 15-20 financial institutions in the world. Rumors of our demise are greatly exaggerated. It would be difficult to address every comment I've read in this thread but suffice it to say that we did not embark on this journey recklessly. Although the migration project itself only took 12 months, we spent the better part of a year evaluating and testing various alternatives before we decided that this was the right way to go for us. I will attempt to address some of the most common questions. We have now been running on our new 3x64 way HP Integrity servers in production for 107 days with zero downtime. FYI, our production environment is made up of a 3 node Oracle 10g RAC cluster and 3 application servers in a load balancing configuration. We use EMC DMX 3000 series storage arrays in a SAN that is for the most part dedicated to this system. Our online and batch performance has actually gotten better than what we were experiencing on the IBM mainframes. Our old system had 7000 MIPS and during peak times, we'd be pushing 100% CPU utilization. We rarely exceed 60% utilization today. Samsung Life has over 40 million active policies that are processed by this system. 35,000 independent insurance agents create millions of transactions daily. We've successfully completed month end and quarter end processing on the new system - in shorter time that it used to take us. We're very confident about our cost savings figures and in fact, they are conservative if anything. We've literally unplugged the mainframes and in fact have sold them - they are not coming back. It was an intense period of 12 months that got us to where we are today. I have lots of grey hairs now that weren't there a year ago. I make no claims that this type of rehosting solution is the right thing for everyone. In our case, the results were spectacular but that by no means guarantees success for anyone else attempting a similar project. Lastly, I have no desire to get into a religious war of mainframe vs. unix. I am platform agnostic. We found something that got us to where we wanted to get to and saved us some decent amount of $$$ along the way. I just presented our case study at a Gartner application development summit and the responses were tremendous. If nothing else, I think our project demonstrates that it is indeed possible to migrate multi-thousand MIPS mainframe environments to a UNIX based system with similar levels of reliability and performance. Sangho Yoon /snip -- 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
FW: Another BIG Mainframe Bites the Dust
REXX is the gold standard for decimal arithemtic but since it is interpreted it is slower than COBOL. Jon L. Veilleux [EMAIL PROTECTED] (860) 636-2683 -Original Message- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tom Marchant Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 10:25 PM To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Another BIG Mainframe Bites the Dust On Thu, 7 Sep 2006 20:16:09 -0300, Clark F Morris [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2. I am saying that COBOL is required to deliver the same results on decimal arithmetic regardless of platform and presence or absence of decimal arithmetic on that platform. Thus the HP Superdomes in this case should still get the same results in any given computation if compatible compiler options are chosen to match what was done on the z series. Maybe so. I don't know, but I'm skeptical. Is there no other language that can be run on z/OS and the HP that will perform proper decimal arithmetic? 3. Packed decimal arithmetic is much slower than binary on the z series. True decimal arithmetic becomes even more painful compute time wise on those platforms that don't have a decimal arithmetic instruction set. The greater speed of the other processors offsets this to at least some extent. Is it? Again, I don't know how the speed of packed decimal arithmetic compares to binary on a z/Architecture box. However, when you look at all the other instructions in a typical DP application, the amount of time spent doing arithmetic as a very small percentage. Tom Marchant -- 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 - This e-mail may contain confidential or privileged information. If you think you have received this e-mail in error, please advise the sender by reply e-mail and then delete this e-mail immediately. Thank you. Aetna -- 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
Re: FW: Another BIG Mainframe Bites the Dust
On Fri, 8 Sep 2006 08:16:39 -0400 Veilleux, Jon L [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: : REXX is the gold standard for decimal arithemtic but since it is :interpreted it is slower than COBOL. Only if an appropriate NUMERIC DIGITS is specified. -- Binyamin Dissen [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.dissensoftware.com Director, Dissen Software, Bar Grill - Israel Should you use the mailblocks package and expect a response from me, you should preauthorize the dissensoftware.com domain. I very rarely bother responding to challenge/response systems, especially those from irresponsible companies. -- 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
FW: Another BIG Mainframe Bites the Dust
I suppose that next you will be telling us that outages are not only expected, but are desirable! Jon L. Veilleux [EMAIL PROTECTED] (860) 636-2683 -Original Message- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Hal Merritt Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 11:36 AM To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Another BIG Mainframe Bites the Dust You are showing your MF bias. Many believe that occasional outages and reduced security levels are not only acceptable, but are to be expected. Most of us know that the cost of availability rises exponentially as you approach 100% on any platform. The selection of a availability percentage (and therefore how much to spend) is a business decision. There are many business cases where even prime time outages are very acceptable. For example, only two of our 12 LPARS has any availability SLA. My $0.02 -Original Message- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Lindy Mayfield Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 4:50 AM To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Another BIG Mainframe Bites the Dust This bit stood out the most for me: According to Sangho Yoon, director of the information strategy team at Samsung, the decision to move off Big Iron was strictly financial. Moving their data warehousing and reporting systems to a superdome would make some sense, but I would think reliability and security would be the top priority for their operational systems. NOTICE: This electronic mail message and any files transmitted with it are intended exclusively for the individual or entity to which it is addressed. The message, together with any attachment, may contain confidential and/or privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, printing, saving, copying, disclosure or distribution is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please immediately advise the sender by reply email and delete all copies. -- 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 - This e-mail may contain confidential or privileged information. If you think you have received this e-mail in error, please advise the sender by reply e-mail and then delete this e-mail immediately. Thank you. Aetna -- 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
FW: Another BIG Mainframe Bites the Dust
I hope that in their evaluation they considered the cost of feeding 20,000 chickens vs the cost of a few good mainframe sysprogs... La sombra sabe! Jon L. Veilleux [EMAIL PROTECTED] (860) 636-2683 I think a lot of it boils back down to what is needed. I'm not a huge fan of server technology (20,000 chickens pulling a plow) but since we don't run PROFS any longer, Locust notes is how I do e-mail. It might be that vendor pricing is in the mix big time (I haven't read the article) or that the mainframe is still seen as old technology with nowhere to grow. Did IBM-Korea do due diligence in trying to avoid this? Maybe the company wanted a now and happening appearance and this fit the bill. Quien sabe! Daniel McLaughlin ZOS Systems Programmer Crawford Company PH: 770 621 3256 * -- 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 - This e-mail may contain confidential or privileged information. If you think you have received this e-mail in error, please advise the sender by reply e-mail and then delete this e-mail immediately. Thank you. Aetna -- 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
Re: FW: Another BIG Mainframe Bites the Dust
On 7 Sep 2006 10:13:38 -0700, in bit.listserv.ibm-main you wrote: I hope that in their evaluation they considered the cost of feeding 20,000 chickens vs the cost of a few good mainframe sysprogs... La sombra sabe! The release said the replacement was only 2 HP Superdomes or whatever their high end server is. Jon L. Veilleux [EMAIL PROTECTED] (860) 636-2683 I think a lot of it boils back down to what is needed. I'm not a huge fan of server technology (20,000 chickens pulling a plow) but since we don't run PROFS any longer, Locust notes is how I do e-mail. snip -- 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
