On Jun 20, 2005, at 1:53 AM, Skip Robinson wrote:
I already confessed to being overly finicky on the real-storage issue.
Besides sack cloth and ashes, I might be due for some hard core self
flagellation.
On the other hand, a few parting observations:
- Whatever comes installed in a CEC, we're talking about 37 MB per
LPAR. We
have some where that might represent 10% of the LPAR allocation.
- There is no excuse for making people languish indefinitely for
something
anywhere near this simple. Period. The problem cited sounds way
bigger than
UCS.
I think most sysprogs in the world do not appreciate how nice the new
Enterprise Cobol features are because -- surprise -- sysprogs don't
spend their days writing Cobol. I just wanted to raise some
awareness that the entire issue might not be the amount of real
storage consumed...and cannot be quantified in terms of pages.
- The price of outfitting gear at Best Buy does not bear on mainframe
configuration. Watches, calculators, cell phones. Amazing gismos
but not
quite ready for prime time commercial data bases.
Ahh, but it does. It gives a good indication of where the current IT-
hardware world is in relation to Moore's Law. You have some people
on this list that would never be able to even consider 37M of real
storage because they have not yet released their grasp on a 24-bit,
16M environment.
I quoted those unrelated prices only to illustrate how absurd it
might be to only consider cost of hardware when making ones decision
on UCS tables.
While Best Buy does not sell mainframe hardware, the factories that
manufacture PC RAM sold there are the same ones that manufacture
mainframe RAM -- the difference being that the mainframe marketed
silicon is selected from the high end of Q&A, never discounted, and
will include error correction, et al.
A one time cost of somewhere between $350 and $470 will put 2G of RAM
in a high end, production quality, unix server. (I'm sure the
mainframes are more expensive) That is enough for 55 of your lightly
weighted LPARs to have full UCS tables. What is that, a single day
of applications programmer time? Two days?
If you put it in those terms it becomes amazing how quickly you
recover the cost of those 37 megabytes.
OK, I'm done.
.
.
JO.Skip Robinson
Southern California Edison Company
SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager
626-302-7535 Office
323-715-0595 Mobile
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> wrote on
06/19/2005
19:44:39:
37 MB is huge? Which decade are you living in? My digital watch has
128 MB. My pocket calculator holds larger memory cards.
Here is an alternative point of view:
I, and a few thousand other apps programmers, have been waiting for
well over a year at my site for a 'non-lazy sysprog' (in your terms)
to implement the table (1208) needed to make half of the Enterprise
Cobol functionality available.
This in a world where IBM doesn't ship a machine with less than 32G
or 64G of real storage? What is the smallest machine they have?
Even the little emulation laptops can hold a few gig of real storage
for the computing pleasure of a single developer.
Not installing the entire set of translations is just begging for
ages and ages of wasted time in development. Even if the sysprogs
are very responsive to requests for new conversion it still means a
few days to get each individual translation added as needed. Only to
save a few meg...
Here is a reality cookie for you -- Best Buy stores are selling 80G
hard drives for USD-19.95. That is about 25 3390's -- or about
USD-0.79 per 3390. I was shocked to see it, it reminded me of the
time I spent $1000 for a used 5M drive and felt I had gotten a great
deal. RAM is equally cheap, but programmer time is not.
You might want to weigh the cost of wasted time for apps people not
having those translations available, having to stop development while
they are added, etc -verses- 37M of real storage. I think you will
be surprised to see which costs less.
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