RE: Prometheus

-----Original Message-----
From: Trevor Perry [mailto:tperry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, May 30, 2006 4:53 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Prometheus

Wow! Did you miss the point.

I have MANY customers running at 100CPW or close. Their applications are 
feature RICH, and they need only a little more CPW - just a server 
modernization for new features. To suggest they should depart the platform 
is ludicrous. With a server that will run their original AS/400 
applications, and can also get them to the web without having to add 
servers, etc, they will be able to run their SMB business for years to come.

I have XML code that runs on a 485 CPW system that can take many minutes to run 
when the document gets over 10 meg in size.  Where I worked recently, on a 570 
with 2 cores we were doing a lot of work with VB code that called SQL 
procedures on the 570 and got result sets back in return. The response time of 
that code was barely acceptable. I dont see how a 100 CPW system will be able 
to return result sets to a PC client VB program with decent response time.

( another example.  I am approaching 1 minute on a 485 CPW system to create a 
service program. Why should I have to limit the number of procedures I have or 
divide them up into many service programs?  Just because the system is so CPW 
starved?  That is no way to sell a modern computer system. )

In my example with the result sets returned from the sql procedures the code 
ran slow mostly because the sql procedures were doing a lot of work and they 
could have been more efficient ( things like creating files in qtemp, etc ).  
But why bother?  If the system is priced per user then we could just throw 
another cheap but powerful CPU core at the problem. IBM makes the same amount 
of money and the customer is happy because they dont have to spend thousands of 
dollars to have their code rewritten.

The p5 is successful and it's system software ( db2 ) is sold per user. IBM 
makes money and the customers are buying a lot of p5s. A good deal all around, 
no?

-Steve