The real strengths of the z platform are in I/O throughput and virtualization. Therefor, as a general rule of thumb, if your workloads are heavily I/O bound or heavy on virtualization, you will probably benefit from zLinux vs some other flavor of Linux on commodity hardware. If you were planning on deploying a large cluster over mega-bit ethernet, the mainframe will get you better inter-node throughput and less administrative fuss since you will have very few hardware failures by comparison, and all but the most modestly priced units have backup parts that kick in when the primary part needs service.
As far as NUMBERS to tell you the difference between a z and, say an alpha or an itanium (itanic, as the redhat folks call it) there are such things but you are comparing apples and oranges. Intels will do some things very well and others poorly. The mmx extensions makes them great as desktop machines, but don't do much to improve overall flops. Even looking at the MIPS is highly misleading. After all, AMD machines with significantly slower clocks get much better performance on many tasks than do Pentiums. By the same token, no AMD system can compete with a comparable P4 in the high-end multi-media niche, specifically PC gaming. Mainframes do several things no other computer does. Mainframe memory banks use hamming for CRCs to ensure that the entire memory bank is consistent from state to state. They can backup several instructions and account for small errors in processing, caused by anything from dust distorting a signal level to a sunspot or cosmic radiation. Not even a cray can do this. Modern mainframes are internally cooled, meaning that a mainframe comes with its own environmental controls, which no commodity platform can boast. To build a Linux cluster with comparable abilities will also require a substantial investment in floorspace, cables, switching power, and data center technicians to handle the volume of maintainence issues. This setup works fine for many people, most notably google, but I can't help bt think that for a one-time investment google could reduce their operating costs dramatically (I don't necessarily encourage that, since they would inevitably downsize a large portion of their IT staff and I'd hate to see thousands more losing their job in this tough economy.) Perhaps there are others on the list who disagree, and will point to hard numbers. Nevertheless, my experience and training both tell me that comparing two computers by the numbers is relatively fruitless. Instead, you will make a much more informed decision by focusing on the features. Erik Johnson On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 10:19 AM, Daniel Vila <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello people , I wanna know if any of you was looking about howto compare > a Zlinux under VM with another platform Linux server in order to know > the convenience to implement or not a server. Any benchmark , or TPMC > comparison will be useful. > > Tks in advance Dany > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit > http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
