On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 1:10 PM, John Hanley <[email protected]> wrote:

> I'm looking to use the new XIV box to for DB2 space in a DB2/WebSphere
> environment.
> The I/O and channel utilization currently is not a problem, but CPU can be.

I thought someone told me XiV would be doing ECKD as well, but I don't
see that at all. Maybe the representative in the booth was just tired
or defaulted to "yes" like a good sales person :-)   Given the XiV,
your option would be than native FC or EDEV, right?

WebSphere should not be an issue, since it normally does not really do
I/O. DB2 might be sensitive to I/O, depending on the type of workload.
You should collect performance data and review that.

If you want a very rough rules of thumb:  I ran a pure I/O workload
(with "dd") and EDEV had a T/V ratio 1.5 and ECKD was around 1.1  This
sounds bad, but it does not tell you anything unless you know how much
CPU your application would spend on I/O.
Assume your DB2 server is busy 20% of the time, and during that time
is 20% in I/O wait. Add a bit for disk writes (your performance data
shows you how much you really write). So it would be doing I/O 5% of
the time. Some of that is CPU and some is waiting for the disk.
Imagine that is 1:5, this would mean 1% of a CPU is spent to issue the
I/O. If CPU is your concern already, it means > 90% of CPU is used for
non-I/O related things. So even when CP adds 0.5% on top, it does not
really make a lot of difference. The difference obviously does show in
synthetic lab experiments, but how many of us run those as their
normal workload.

It's a poorly kept secret that I can often be talked into reviewing
performance data...

Rob
-- 
Rob van der Heij
Velocity Software
http://www.velocitysoftware.com/

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