Craddock, Chris wrote:
We started down the SYSPLEX road, but never could get hardware
resources, then dropped from 6 to 3 LPAR's after Y2K.
Setting up a ESCON CTC isn't all that difficult and won't cost you
anything except a pair of ESCON channels. With that, you can set up a
3-LPAR SYSPLEX with GRS capabilities and go forward from there. Helps
immensely if you diagram it out before you start to define the IOCDS
entries.
Don't forget that (AFAIK) all currently supported processors support
some form of xMIF, meaning that you don't really need actual physical
CTCs for connections within the same
CEC/Box/<your_favorite_name_for_a_box> so if you're just connecting
LPARS in the same machine you can do it trivially.
<soapbox>
Here we are in 2007. It is simply staggering to me that people are still
whining about perceived "problems" and costs associated with sysplex.
Those old chestnuts are bogus. There is NO GOOD REASON to run monoplexes
in preference to at least a basic sysplex.
There are. Different LPARs run different businesses, different
companies. Different security rules. Strict for production, light for
development.
And if you really do need to
run multiple LPARS for your work, then you need to do some soul
searching about parallel sysplex. The benefits are enormous and the
costs really aren't.
I can't find *ANY* benefit of running *unrelated* systems on one CPC in
sysplex. If you have more than one machine then pricing model could rape
you to do sysplex, however it could be cheaper and more convenient to
have *ONE* CPC.
Sysplex always mean higher CPU utilization. Well tuned sysplex takes
about 5% of CPU, but it can be 20-30% (it expected it during some tests).
Base sysplex or even GRSplex is a cost. Relatively small in terms of
investmens, however there's also software cost - laready mentioned
higher CPU utilization.
Parallel sysplex can improve work of sysplex, but the cost is
significantly higher - ICF is approx. $120k. For "single-CPC" sysplex.
When multi-CPC, you need much more equipment.
We still talk about connecting unrelated systems into sysplex.
Oh, one more "benefit": migration effort. <g>
Yes, I'm aware of RAS, five nines (99.999%) etc. However my business
needs less nines, less costs.
--
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland
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