I've recently inherited the support for DB2 on a couple of OS/390
platforms.  Since DB2 on these machines is expensive to use for us and
their usage is driving software costs up, I've been challenged by my
management to determine if an RS/6000 S80 may be a viable alternative to
using DB2 on OS/390.

Here's our configuration:
Two data centers geographically separated.

Each running an OS/390 on an Amdahl processor equivelant to an IBM S390
9672-R25. 3 processors, 2gb main memory, 2gb expanded memory. Storage on
EMC Symmetrix.  Running DB2 v6.1.  Upgrading to DB2 v7.1 in the next few
months. No partitioned databases - there's a separate machine for that.
DB2 usage is about 10-12 MSUs.

Each data center also running an RS/6000 S80 w/ 6 processors and 24GB
memory.  Storage on EMC Symmetrix.  Running DB2 v7.2 EE.

If anyone has any published work comparing the use of DB2 on these two
platforms they may have done or know of any or has done this before,
would you be so kind as to forward that on to me?  I'm very interested
to discuss how you went about comparing the amount of work the database
engines on each must do to complete SQL requests.

Please respond to the newsgroup or to me directly.

Thanks in advance,
Paul Murphy

You might want to discuss with your IBM rep if you can go DB2 on
Linux/390....
Supposedly that should drive down the cost of the 390..

Cheers
Serge
--
Serge Rielau
DB2 UDB SQL Compiler Development
IBM Software Lab, Canada

Thanks for the quick reply.

We've briefly discussed this also, but have a lot of unasked questions
regarding it, like how much resource will it use to do the same amount
of work?  How is it priced in Linux/390?  Expressed as a percent, how
much would I expect to drive down the cost of DB2 on Linux/390?  Can I
get Linux/390 on a trial basis?  I'll call our IBM rep in the morning.

I know I'll have RS/6000 resource available, I know I won't have
Linux/390 any time soon.

I'm still interested in knowing if anyone's compared a fixed amount of
sql work on DB2 between an OS/390 and RS/6000.

I've checked www.TPC.org and was unable to find a comparison between
these two platforms.

Cheers
Serge
--
Serge Rielau
DB2 UDB SQL Compiler Development
IBM Software Lab, Canada

The biggest differences are between the two platforms and what they target,
or more precisely, what the RS/6000 doesn't target, rather then DB2 issues.
If you have a productive DB2 on OS/390, moving to RS/6000 is foolhardy -
unless you really love fighting problems regarding stability, reliability,
backup, restore, storage management and other functional differences that
have nothing to do with SQL performance - that will be the least of your
problems. Moreover, the RS/6000 system will cost you significantly more
money in the end run - as you will discover when you review the costs after
the migration... The Gartner group has published details on this, but
customer experience won't be printed because what corporation is willing to
admit that they made a mistake?