I missed the original poster's summary of how SAS is used at his company. That might be good to know to offer the best advice.
In addition to the excellent suggestions previously offered, there are some companies that use the "penalty box" technique in such cases. This works for situations where all the following conditions hold: is... (1) "high priced" software (and ideally more than one product); (2) licensed according to whole frame capacity (not LPAR size or "enterprise MIPS"); (3) an amount of workload which would fit into a substantially smaller system than the "main" production workload; (4) not tightly dependent on the "main" software products (reasonably "separable workload"). If all those conditions hold, then you can investigate whether it makes financial sense to buy a physically separate frame (such as a z9 BC or possibly used z890) as a "penalty box." Having an additional frame may also have other benefits, such as allowing you to bring mainframe DR in house if you don't have a DR system at present, so there are other factors to consider. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Specializing in Software Architectures Related to System z Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan and IBM Asia-Pacific 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
