On Tue, 2012-10-30 at 12:15 -0500, Duerbusch, Tom wrote:

> Don't discount the DASD system on a z box.

We don't.  That's why all our database applications run on Z-Linux.  We
just need a super-fast cache that a virtual platform has a problem
with.

>
> My IBM DS6800 manual states that a properly configured DS6800 can support
> 330,000 I/Os per second.  Obviously, no one actually has a properly
> configured DS6800 (and I assume that the DS8*** boxes are even better).

We use DS8800's and they work as advertised - once you get around to
actually doing I/O.

>
> My point is that the PC I/O system really pales compared to a modern
> mainframe.  If your application needs to support 10,000 I/Os per second or
> so, you won't need the "tricks".

The real "trick" is configuring DASD ;)

It's not the r/w's  that are killing us - it's the latency on a small
subset of our workload.  Http queries that should be sub-second suddenly
take 2-4 or even 30 seconds.   Maybe because we have 3 or 4 JVM's and 20
virtual machines up and running. Or maybe because there's something
wrong with our DS8800 configuration,  I dunno.

>
> And, of course, a good performance monitor can, more easily, point you to
> where any performance bottlenecks are.

Last time I got a quote on one of those, it cost twice what an 1-u
server with 256 GB memory costs.  And then you have to learn to use it,
and watch it.  With the Intel server, I put it in, it solves the latency
problem and I can get back to applications work.

Roger
Autodata Norge A/S

>
> Tom Duerbusch
> THD Consulting
>
> On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 9:00 AM, David Boyes <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > >But our Z enthusiast
> > > says we can put Redis and memcache on Z-Linux (under VM) without any
> > > loss of functionality or performance (because we have extra capacity and
> > > "paging on Z doesn't cost anything").
> >
> > I'd agree on functionality, but performance is a harder question.  Both
> > redis and memcache build and run fine on Z, no problems there. The trick is
> > that memory usage in a shared environment is much trickier to calculate the
> > impact of mass allocations of RAM -- depends a lot on where and how fast
> > you page, whether you have XSTOR or not, etc, etc, etc,.
> >
> > I'd try it with a smaller database and see how it goes. XSTORE will have a
> > measurable impact, as will use of VDISK for paging.
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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>
>
>
> --
>
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