RE: TRYING understanding new AS Iserv

Interactive is 5250 green screen IO including TN5250 or any of the 5250
telnet applications.  There is a gray area for me around Vt100 and 3270
telnet.  Data queues, ODBC, Sockets, LU6.2, DDM, DRDA, FTP, JDBC, and their
ilk are not interactive.  Screen scrapers like Seagull use 5250 out to the
client then customize the presentation.  They show up as interactive.

If you can reengineer your apps to present VB screens that communicate with
the 400 via remote data queue or some similar arrangement, you get to use
the non-interactive CPW rating and you won't see significant CFINT on your
system.

Reengineering on this scale is a pretty massive undertaking.  Try it with a
trivial app (single panel, no subfile, both character and numeric variables,
one or two indicators) then try it again with a small production app.  That
will tell you what you need to know.  Work through the issues connected with
change control, monitoring and performance, upgrades, testing, national
languages, and problem determination.  Think about new DLLs to go with a new
version of VB or C or Delphi or whatever.  Remember, a list box isn't the
same as a subfile.  Look very carefully at grid controls or plan to use
dialog boxes for all record update IO.  Don't forget to consider commitment
control.  Your transaction is more spread out now and commitment control
becomes more important.

For what it's worth, I would only do this on NT.  95 & 98 are too flaky and
I don't trust 2000 yet.  I suppose that you could use OS/2, it's pretty
stable ... :)

Richard Jackson
mailto:richardjackson@richardjackson.net
http://www.richardjacksonltd.com
Voice: 1 (303) 808-8058
Fax:   1 (303) 663-4325

-|-----Original Message-----
-|From: owner-midrange-l@midrange.com
-|[mailto:owner-midrange-l@midrange.com]On Behalf Of D.BALE@handleman.com
-|Sent: Wednesday, October 25, 2000 10:37 AM
-|To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
-|Subject: TRYING undestanding new AS Iserv
-|
-|
-|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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