>>> On 10/30/2012 at 02:24 PM, "McKown, John" <[email protected]> wrote: > This may be a bit weird. At present, we are running on a z9BC with two CPs. > My boss is talking with _someone_ about upgrading to a z10 of some sort with > 2 CPs. Apparently the vendor is willing to sweeten the deal by throwing in an > IFL. I don't know how powerful an IFL is on a z10. We had one long ago on a > z890 and it was OK. My manager is thinking that one possible use of the IFL > would be to move some Linux systems off of a Power570 onto the IFL. I don't > know if he means under z/VM or in an LPAR. Given how cheap we are, I'd bet > the later.
You don't specify EC versus BC, but a z10 EC processor is 4.4 GHz, the BC is 3.5 GHz. From what I recall, a z890 was 800 MHz, a z9 BC was about 1.4 GHz. A Power 570 box seems to have been available with 3.5, 4.2, 4.4, or 5.0 GHz processors. For I/O intensive workloads, those numbers will be far less relevant to actual performance. > I am ASSuming that z/Linux would likely have most, if not all, of the > packages which run on Linux on the Power570. That should be the case. Both Red Hat and SUSE try to build all the packages on all the architectures for consistency's sake, even if that doesn't necessarily make much practical sense. -snip- > Does anybody know where I might be able to compare performance of z/Linux on > a z10 versus Linux on a Power570? I know nothing about the Power570 machine; > what is running on the Linux instance(s); or even if there are multiple > instances under PowerVM. I basically know nothing. There's way too much "it depends" built into that. A Power 570 box could have anywhere from 1 to 32 CPU cores in it, along with 4GB to 768GB of RAM. That system could be 99.99% idle or very busy with its current workload. One IFL could be woefully inadequate, or handle everything easily. As you indicate, details matter. -snip- > From some of what he has said, I get the impression that he thinks > that it is a simple "copy the files, boot the system, and GO!". Like you, I don't think that's very likely, with the exception of interpreted languages. It might be worthwhile to try and move one or more Linux instances from the Power box to the z10. If nothing else it might give some hints as to how well things perform in comparison. Mark Post ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
