TRYING undestanding new AS Iserv -- MIDRANGE-L

Regarding "interactive"...

Please educate me (again?) on what does and what does not constitute
interactive as far as a user using a display/keyboard/mouse (in other words,
*not* what I consider a traditional "batch" job).  I.e., is a Client/Server
app considered to be an interactive task on the AS/400?  Other examples?  And,
if I'm on the right path, is there a tool that converts a AS/400 green screen
interactive task to a GUI of some sort and makes it a non-interactive task?

*AND*, if I can convert all interactive tasks so that they become
non-interactive as far as the AS/400 is concerned (can't bring myself to call
it batch), does that happen to translate that I'd be able to get more overall
horsepower for less money, i.e., don't have to buy much interactive CPW?  (Of
course, did I just increase my costs on the client side with more required
hardware and/or software?)

I thought I'd heard all this before, but it was rather moot in my previous
environments.  Now I'm in a shop that's considering a major upgrade,
consolidating several AS/400s into one LPAR box.  And so I wondered if this
should be looked at before any decision is made.

Dan Bale
IT - AS/400
Handleman Company
248-362-4400  Ext. 4952

-------------------------- Original Message --------------------------
Marco-
You wrote:
>Hy i'm from Italy.
>We're are deciding to buy a new as400 820 with 35 CPW of interactive and
>370 CPW all.
>We actually have a model 500/2141 that's a 30.6 CPW for Interactive and
>Batch all together.
>Our session (about 120) are interactive for the most.
>Is it the right choice????
>How much is my actually interactive CPW???

There is an IBM web site  http://www.as400.ibm.com/configure/Welcome.htm
which includes a Workload Estimator that may be helpful.
My informal approach would be to try to determine what percent of your
current workload is interactive.
If you have performance tools, then you can STRPFRMON for an hour
during a busy period and collect data at 5-minute intervals.
Then use the Performance Advisor to display the data you just
collected, and it will show you the percent of CPU utilization for
interactive jobs and for batch.
If you're using 50% of your 30.6 CPW processor for interactive, you will
need an Interactive Feature which is larger than 15.3 CPW plus your
estimated growth requirements.
If you don't have Performance Tools, then you can try to get an idea
about interactive vs. batch workload from the WRKSYSSTS display.
Just remember that if you look at a 10 minute period using
WRKSYSSTS, any user who signs off or any batch job that completes
before the 10 minutes are up won't be reflected in the total.
Note: if your system performance is very bad now, this informal
approach to system sizing won't work because you have no idea how much
pent-up demand there is for system resources (work that just isn't
getting done right now.)

Dan Rothman,  IBM iSeries 400 and AS/400 Specialist
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