On 17/07/2021 8:46 pm, Brian Westerman wrote:
once they figured out that the two "sample" sites I was dealing with were z13s (80mip)
and a z15t02 (88mip), they decided that they needed to republish the "minimum"
requirements. If you look at the guide now, they use a 400+mip box to do the setup and testing.
Software pricing has really strangled the small end of the mainframe market.
Mainframe workloads are usually distant enough from other systems that
we don't properly see the scale, but the reality is that these systems
are tiny by current standards.
I didn't realize the problem until I looked properly at the LSPR and CPU
charts while investigating a customer performance issue.
I develop in Java, and it has been a useful coincidence that work runs
at a similar speed on my PC and on the z/OS test system. That makes my
PC with 6 cores roughly equivalent to a 8561-606 at 6000 MIPS. My PC
seems about 10x faster than a Raspberry Pi, which makes a Raspberry Pi
(4 core) equivalent to about 400 MIPS. These sub-100 MIPS systems seem
to be roughly equivalent in CPU power to 1/4 of a Raspberry Pi.
This causes a number of problems:
- Customers spend a large amount of time managing performance
- It is impractical to move workload to the mainframe, and rewards
moving workload off
- It is a headache for software vendors that need to cater for very
small systems - as IBM is discovering with z/OSMF
I would like to see IBM set a minimum system size more in line with
current expectations - something equivalent to e.g. an Intel Core i3:
minimum of 4 CPUs and 3-4000 MIPS.
Software vendors would have to adjust their pricing to avoid ridiculous
upgrade charges, but overall it would make the mainframe healthier.
Usage based pricing doesn't help either. It's no use having the capacity
if you can't afford to use it.
--
Andrew Rowley
Black Hill Software
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