On 10/23/06, Walter Marguccio <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
this has been cross-posted to the ibmmain-list
we are a shop with a z890-230 with three zOS.e LPARs in Basic
Sysplex. We'd be really happy to consolidate some of our applications
running right now on Blades and/or pSeries on the mainframe due to
reliability and scalability of the latter. Within the Try&Buy
agreement with IBM we got one IFL and 16 GB memory on the fly (just a
microcode update), added two zLinux
LPARs to be run in native and installed DB2 8.2.2 onto SuSE Enterprise
9. Well, the first results we have been having are pretty discouraging.
We have been running some benchmarks in form of scripts on 4 different
machines
pSeries Power 3, two PPC3 @ 450 MHz;
Intel-based board with two Pentium 3 @ 933 MHz;
z890, 1IFL @ 1,3GHz (?)
OpenPower 720, 2 PPC5 @ 1,6 GHz
and all benchmarks show that our IFL is *FAR* behind the Power5 architecture
(round 20.000 Eur).
Somehow, too slow to be true .... Without not going too much in detail
about what the benchmarks did, they performed operations like loading
and selects over joined tables - basic database I/O tasks.
Either we are doing something conceptually wrong, or we are expecting too much
from the IFL and/or zLinux.
Comments, remarks, recommendations, pointer to further documentation are
really welcome.
Regards.
Walter Marguccio
z/OS Systems Programmer
Munich - Germany
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I got lost in all the response to your question so I will just share
my experience.
Same as you, we have a z890 and same as you we had one IFL. For the
purposes of benchmarking, we increased the z890 to two IFL's so we
could compare to AIX on 4 CPU's running at 1.6 GHz each (p-570). In
both cases, 4 GB of real memory. Our workload was Java 1.4 driving
Oracle 10.2. We had members who wanted to see AIX do better and
members who wanted to see Linux on z-Series do better. We applied all
the apples-to-apples principles that were technically possible.
We ran all variations for 3 months and at the end recommended the
z-Series solution. The reason: performance #1, high availability #2,
TCO #3.
Key issues:
1) make sure your Oracle parameters take advantage of the bigger
processing capability of the z-Series. When we first ran we noticed
AIX at over 85% busy and zVM/Linux at 60% busy. Once Oracle
parameters were set up properly we got the z890 running at 80%
(interesting enough, Oracle 10 can self-optimize and it produces
excellent results). Our DBA caused some of our grief by trying to
optimize the Linux/Oracle solution to parameters that were better in
AIX. This is a long story in itself so I won't bore you.
2) On the z890 we ran zVM and allocated 25% of memory to expanded.
3) On Linux, our SWAP was VDISK with higher priority. We did have one
SWAP on real disk just in case. The system locked up a few times for
not having enough SWAP.
4) We took down all guests and only ran zVM and the one Linux guest
running the benchmark. Nothing else except your minimum CMS service
machines.
5) We did optimization for Java and implemented the same in both AIX
and Linux (pay attention to heap).
6) Take down tops and any monitors in Linux and use zVM toolkit.
7) We used ext3 LVM with ECKD/Ficon disks (EMC Sym). If we had
SCSI/FCP direct attach we would have done better.
We found that on AIX about 40% of the processing power was going to I/O's.
On the z890, we got our results with a 20% improvement. We ran the
IFL at 80% but as you know the I/O's were being handled over to the
I/O CPU.
The improvementes were in terms of response time and batch processing times.
If I can be of any more assistance please let me know.
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