Eric, Yes, you would definitely bury Escon channels doing anything with current disk or tape. However, moving to 4 Gb Ficon (much less 8 Gb) you won't see any significant delays across the channels - unless you have a huge, well-balanced DASD farm (without balanced channels :-) )
Rex -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Eric Bielefeld Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2009 11:11 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: IBM Announces FICON Express8 I doubt if the new channels will be significantly more expensive if you buy them with a new machine. If you just took delivery of your machine 2 months ago, and then realize these chanells could help because you have a huge DASD farm, you might be talking significant dollars, although if you have the processing for a significant DASD farm, the added cost might not seem so high. Since I'm not working now, I can't really ask IBM how much these channels cost, and I'm sure if someone else found out, they wouldn't be allowed to say how much they cost. Radoslaw - I suspect your right about these new channels not helping the I/O load much for the average shop. I know when I worked at P&H Mining, the only time I ever saw channels above 50% where when backups were running, and all 16 of our 3490E tape drives were running. I believe that caused significant delays backing up through the 4 Escon channels attached to the 2 controllers, but then in the manufacturing environment they had, it wasn't that critical to get the batch done that fast. Actually, Australia and a few other parts of the world that used our mainframe did experience delays during their prime shifts, but I guess they learned to live with it. I suspect the real benefit will come when all the devices made include support for the new channels, and that probably will be awhile. Eric Bielefeld Sr. Systems Programmer Milwaukee, Wisconsin 414-475-7434 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
