Mainframe economics continue to improve, and it's important to take advantage of that if you can, when you can.
With respect to the z10 BC and its IFLs, let's consider a back-of-the-envelope exercise for WebSphere Application Server workloads. I'm going to use IBM's LSPR PCI metric as a proxy for relative performance. (It's a pretty good one.) If you have three IFLs (only), that's the rough equivalent of a Z03 capacity setting, which has a PCI of 1777. If WebSphere Application Server is configured in such a way to be capable of running on all three IFLs, you would need to license 360 Processor Value Units (PVUs) worth of WebSphere (120 PVUs per z10 IFL). Thus you get about 4.94 PCIs per PVU -- that's a metric of software license efficiency, similar to kilometers per gallon. Now, let's re-run this calculation for a z114. Three IFLs on that machine would be roughly equivalent to a PCI of 2026. Also, z114 IFLs require only 100 PVUs each. So, taking 2026 and dividing by 300, you get about 6.75. That's an almost 37% improvement in performance per dollar of software licensing! That's huge. That doesn't count the performance improvements made in newer software releases, which are also huge. Even when you keep the version levels the same, if you can get to the latest JVM (in WAS 8) you'll find some exploitation of instructions found only in z196/z114. So I think it's fair to say that 37% improvement is more like a floor and less like a ceiling in this example. And this is just looking at the IBM software licensing, which is just a piece of the financial picture -- and probably not the most significant piece here. But it is an interesting piece. Also, in general, data centers aren't getting less full nor is expanding them (or building new ones) getting any cheaper. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples Resident Enterprise Architect (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
