820 upgrade from an S20

This message is on the bpcs-l & midrange-l lists so if you have already seen
it, sorry.

Our lease on an S(as in Sam)20 is due to expire in 4+ months.  Our BP was in
talking about upgrading it to an 820.  This upgrade through the end of
November has a 5% rebate plus some other rebates from the BP which would
give us a lower monthly lease cost.

S20 is a model 2165 with CPW ratings of 49.7 & 464.3.  I,024MB of memory &
33.52 GB Raid 5 disk of 10 4.xx GB drives at 7200 rpm(?).  Software tier is
P10.  Drives are about 52 % full.

820 is a model 2396-1521 with CPW ratings of 35 & 950.  The 820 migration
tower will contain an additional 750 MB of memory & 4 8.5GB 10K rpm drives.
Software tier is a P20.  Now I will have two "boxes" - the original S20
minus its CPU's plus the 820 "migration" tower.  Another 220 outlet required
& now I have to look at how much the UPS can handle.  It currently has the
S20 & a 720 running through it.  The serial number will stay the same.

We are running BPCS 6.0.02 full client/server with roughly 50 users.  We
have been live since August of 1998.  BPCS software price is user based so
the tier change does not affect us.  Other 3rd party software is serial
number based so no new fees are required there.  Disaster recovery services
through Sungard will change but I don't know by how much.

That we will upgrade to ver. 6.1.x of BPCS within a year is a good
possibility & is the 35/950 CPW enough to handle that version of BPCS?

The major concern I had was going from two processors down to one.
Originally our BPCS users tended to crash & burn more frequent than I liked
to see which more than likely hung their job & their processor.  Jobs slowed
down but we still had another processor working until I could kill the hung
job. In the last year or so, we have probably only hung a job/processor once
or twice.  So the two processor concern seems to be a thing of the past.
With two processors, it meant that each CPU was half the total rating - 232
in batch.  With the single processor, I will have more than 4 times the CPW
rating.  Things obviously will not run 4 times faster but they should
definitely run faster.  I can run month end on my low end 720 test box & it
runs quicker than on the S20 production machine which always amazed me until
the splitting of the CPW between processors was explained to me.

I am exploring the possibility of taking the ILE compiler off the production
machine & only leaving it on the test machine which is a P10 software tier.
They are in the same room 17" apart.  This extra money I would use to buy
more memory.  I would like to do more with pools & running specific jobs in
their own pool so the more memory I have, the more I can partition jobs.
Query/400 I would like to also take off because Query/400 & QM/400 each are
$3,200.00.  I don't know SQL well enough so that is not an option.  Although
I am converting my queries to QM/400 queries & I will use Interactive SQL to
generate "looks" & reports, just not as comfortable with the product.  Quick
& dirty, I still use Query/400 as a crutch.  QM/400 can do the same & more
but the using/learning curve is still a struggle.

The name of the game is to spend less - that is the mandate from management
for the upcoming budget cycle.  

Does someone have any other suggestion(s)?  Also, will the proposed machine
handle the latest version of BPCS - be it mixed mode or client/server?

Dennis Munro

"I love deadlines.  I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they
go flying by."  Dilbert's Words Of Wisdom:

Badger Mining Corporation
www.badgerminingcorp.com
dmunro@badgerminingcorp.com
(920) 361-2388

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