On 17/05/2022 2:27 pm, Brian Westerman wrote:
What will be done for the smaller systems z13s level that only have 15MSU
(80MIP) in the entire box?
I have a certain sympathy with the z/OSMF developers. 80 MIPS was a
small system even back in the late 1990s wasn't it? Hardware limitations
due to software pricing is strangling the low end mainframe market in
particular.
It would benefit customers, software vendors and IBM if IBM could get
these small systems onto more reasonably sized hardware. We get a
certain pleasure from extracting everything possible from a small
system, but in reality it's not productive work.
I would love to see IBM say the smallest system they will sell is e.g.
equivalent computing power to a low-mid Intel system, maybe minimum 4
CPU and 200 MSU - and no sub capacity measurement below that size. (On
my Dallas RDP system z/OSMF starts in about 40s. That system runs single
threaded Java work at a similar speed to my desktop PC. Roughly
converting, I think that makes my 6 core desktop PC equivalent to
600-700 MSU.)
Vendors would be forced to rework their pricing for small systems. If
the jump is big enough and forced by IBM you can't just tell customers
to suck it up and fork out the big bucks or you lose the customer.
It would cause pain for vendor pricing teams, but would benefit their
developers and the mainframe market in the long run. It would be more
practical to run new work on the mainframe (including z/OSMF), reduce
the pressure to move work off small systems, and eliminate many
performance problems.
zIIPs, System Recovery Boost etc are really just workarounds for the
fact that the smallest Z systems are too small. So much effort expended
to limit system capacity to last century levels...
--
Andrew Rowley
Black Hill Software
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