John S. Giltner writes: >Right now the plan is to ONLY have 96 total "cores" (some systems will >have single core processors and some will have dual core) CPU's and 456 >GB of RAM. This is a est. and they beleive that they may need to >increase this by as much as 50%. >So the "head to head" comparsion is 7 CPU's and 20GB to 96 CPU's and 456 >GB of RAM. Doesn't seem to "head to head" to me.
So let's suppose it's 130 cores, for sake of argument. Just curious, but do you then get to double that to support disaster recovery? (Will the disaster recovery work?) Dean Kent writes: >Yes, reliability, fault-tolerance, data integrity, >etc. are all factors too - but the mainframe does not have a lock on these >features, other platforms do as well, including those based on x86. I'm sorry, Dean, but that statement borders on malpractice. If you focus solely on the chip you're totally missing the point, because business outcome <> two chips. Why are we still focused on the chip in this discussion? John Giltner makes an excellent point, and SPEC wouldn't give you a clue about his situation. Also, the chips, though still important, are probably the least important architectural component in delivering reliability, fault tolerance, data integrity, and other service qualities. As just one example among many, if there's another way to have an active-active highest availability MQ configuration without using z/OS and shared queues in an IBM coupling facility, I'd be interested to know what it is. To pick another example, there's just nothing else like DB2 data sharing. Even Larry Ellison said so. Are there any other general purpose business servers constitutionally capable of delivering five-9s business service availability, no excuses (i.e. including both planned and unplanned outages)? General purpose here means, in particular, running middleware that's actually market relevant? There are niche systems, perhaps. There are also general purpose servers that don't meet the business service availability levels. Is the combination of "general purpose" and "highest service qualities" unique to the IBM mainframe? I think so. Let me try to make it simple again. An IBM mainframe is, quite literally, an entire data center in one box. (The earlier server farm comment is quite correct.) If you can benchmark an entire data center all at once you might be on to something. As it turns out some of the outsourcing companies are relatively good at this. You can also get IBM to do the work independently, dispassionately. One good example: http://www.ibm.com/servers/library/pdf/scorpion.pdf - - - - - 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
