A few years ago my company went through a project of benchmarking the various platforms with a view to migrating all workload to a single architecture.
At the start of the project, they had a maniframe running a mixture of IMS/DB2 with the usual online and batch load, a VAX cluster running office systems (e-mail in the main), a few hundred networked PC's, and a few UNIX servers for very specialised applications. The PC's were considered far too unreliable and weak to support any significant load (we're speaking mid-90's), so the other platforms were to be tested. Each of the platforms had, of course, their advocates - and passionate they were too. The project hit an immediate bump when it came to trying to design a workload which could be run on each candidate platform. It was proving impossible to persuade the VAX people that a punishing I/O load would be a necessary test, while they demanded that a richer application mix would be a true test of the mainframe. The UNIX users, mainly CAD applications - merely grinned and asked where the multi-screen 25" 3270 workstations were to be found. The suppliers, were no help whatever - and for obvious reasons. I'm absolutely certain that they preferred to maintain proprietary benchmarking standards as a defensive strategy (Digital had VUP's as their performance metric, IIRC). It seemed to be mutally agreeable to them all that their machines couldn't be easily compared for speed. Indeed, their message repeated that of the internal advocates, citing the differing nature of the workloads for which their machine was designed. In the end, an "all hands on DEC" strategy was proposed, although I believe they are running entirely on PC servers now. As an aside, I rather liked the Vax machines, and VMS was a nice OS to work on. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
