>we are a shop with a z890-230 with three zOS.e LPARs in Basic Sysplex. We'd be really happy to consolidate some of our applications running right now on Blades and/or pSeries on the mainframe due to reliability and scalability of the latter. Within the Try&Buy agreement with IBM we got one IFL and 16 GB memory on the fly (just a microcode update), added two zLinux LPARs to be run in native and installed DB2 8.2.2 onto SuSE Enterprise 9. Well, the first results we have been having are pretty discouraging. We have been running some benchmarks in form of scripts on 4 different machines and all benchmarks show that our IFL is *FAR* behind the Power5 architecture (round 20.000 Eur). >Somehow, too slow to be true .... Without not going too much in detail about what the benchmarks did, they performed operations like loading and selects over joined tables - basic database I/O tasks. > >Either we are doing something conceptually wrong, or we are expecting too much from the IFL and/or zLinux. Comments, remarks, recommendations, pointer to further documentation are really welcome. ======================================================================
This is a common happening when z/OS'ers bring up zLinux. Tuning zLinux is counter to everything we learned over the years. We have SuSe Linux 9 up with UDB/DB2 and running 45 virtual Penguins on a z900 IFL and the little puppy is not breathing hard (UDB, Websphere, TAMS/Webseal, Virtual Switches & Firewalls, LDAP going to z/OS's RACF). Should look at z/VM just to be a Hypervisor for all the Penguins and gives you the chance to run a whole bunch of Virtual machines. IBM is almost giving it away for under $20K I last heard and also not restricted to an IFL. Yes, I know a z/OS'er doing VM is also counter but z/VM is far, far easier to do than z/OS and goes up in a few days. IBM may still have the free 4day z/VM&Linux class which gives you everything to actually do it. Go visit Barton Robinson's site for tuning stuff. The z/VM'ers have adopted zLinux with a passion. Software licensing costs for things are a fraction of z/OS, Windows, SUN, etc especially since things are licensed per processor (z890 IFL = Laptop processor). Bringing up 5 UDB instances is the difference of $27K versus $135K (5x$27K); Oracle runs $40K per processor. www.velocity-software.com Jim Marshall ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
