1. IBM’s Big Announcement Day
2. Cheryl Watson’s TUNING Letter 2000, No. 4 Update
1. IBM’s Big Announcement Day
This was a big announcement day for IBM as they introduced their new eSeries, consisting of 26 new mainframe processors (the zSeries 900), and several new UNIX, mid-range and Intel-base processors. Highlights of all eSeries processors include higher reliability for e-business work and Capacity Upgrade on Demand (CUoD) features. I’ll have a full discussion of the new zSeries in the next TUNING Letter. There are many links to the new announcement, but I think this one is the easiest: http://www.ibm.com/servers/news.
The software announced with the zSeries 900 is z/OS and Linux for zSeries 900. That’s right – V2R10 was the LAST release of OS/390! In one of the announcements, IBM indicated that benchmarks showed you could run 2500 Linux users on their smallest zSeries (the 101 at 250 MIPS) for $500 per user (or $1.2M for the entire configuration). This should make people sit up and notice Linux on a mainframe. The three major items included in z/OS (in my opinion) are new pricing (see below), automatic workload balancing across LPARs (was called ‘LPAR clustering’ and is now called ‘Intelligent Resource Director or IRD’), and support for 64-bit real architecture. Interestingly enough, the LPAR concept is now being implemented on all of the other IBM server lines, including Intel-based machines.
A major component of the announcement was the introduction of a new software pricing model called Workload License Charges (WLC), that for many products allows you to pay for just what you use. I’ll have lots more about this in the next TUNING Letter (now in process). The hardware pricing is also flexible, allowing you to pay for just the capacity that you use, measured by a 4-hour rolling average.
z/OS will be able to run on G5, G6 and MP3000 processors (but not in 64-bit mode) and on the new zSeries 900 (in 64-bit mode). There is no announced end of support for OS/390 R10, but because it’s the last release of OS/390, IBM is expected to make some allowance for future support. OS/390 R6 through R10 will be able to run on the zSeries 900.
My initial MIPS estimate for the base model zSeries will be sent today to electronic subscribers of Cheryl Watson’s TUNING Letter. Print subscribers may send an email to admin@watsonwalker.com with their company name and address to receive the MIPS estimates.
2. Cheryl Watson’s TUNING Letter 2000 No. 4 Update
The SHARE presentations mentioned in this issue are now online at http://www.share.org.
There was a typo in the last electronic TUNING Letter issue (it’s been corrected in the print version):
On page 27, Greg Thompson’s presentation on OS/390 R9 User Experiences was session 2832 (not 2815). Also, the enhancement to the ‘ls’ command for identifying APF-authorized programs is ‘ls -E’, not ‘ls -e’. It’s case sensitive. This enhancement was actually introduced in R8.
Stay tuned!