The announcement letter is here for 8 Gbps: http://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/7/897/ENUS109-417
Shipments should start very soon (on July 31, 2009). FICON Express8 is available for System z10 EC and BC. IBM is withdrawing FICON Express4 adapters for z10 machines (only) effective October 27, 2009. There are some sample benchmark numbers in the announcement letter, and what's particularly interesting is that there's improved performance in many areas even if the link speed remains at 2 or 4 Gbps. So FICON Express8 should still be of interest even if you do not upgrade storage devices immediately. (Obviously the 8 Gbps speed is yet again better, though.) There are many workloads and workload mixes that can benefit from faster I/O. For many workloads there is also a trade-off between I/O speeds and CPU consumption. That is, faster I/O can help reduce CPU consumption in many situations. Faster I/O can also speed batch processing (if I/O bound), which may allow you to adjust softcaps downward while still meeting your batch processing deadlines. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan / 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
