Many thanks to Pete and Rob and John. Your comments are greatly appreciated!
Regards,
Phil
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John Jones
Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 9:16 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Sizing modern machines to replace 720's on V4R5
IIRC there was a JDE cume level needed to get to V5R1 or whichever release
it was where IBM upped the max spool file/job limit. It might have just
been a specific SAR. Get to at least cume 13 but get current if you can.
Cume 15 adds web-based access for free so that might be a bonus for you.
Make sure any custom or third party apps you have will run on V5R4.
The newer hardware is ridiculously fast compared to your old 720. Not only
are the CPUs faster, but so is the memory and system bus. The RAID
controllers have improved greatly and the disks are faster as well (not only
10K to 15K RPM but each rev of disk tech usually brings a performance gain
via denser platters or better firmware). Do yourself a favor and don't
carry over any hardware from the old box. Well, carry over the power cord
if you want.
That said, there are areas to improve v. a stock config. Get the best disk
controller you can (the base controller isn't the best). Go SAS instead of
SCSI. 8 of the 140GB disks would be sufficient; that's 980GB after RAID5.
If you can afford more disks, that's good too but not absolutely necessary
as long as your RAID card has a good amount of cache. I wouldn't buy
smaller than the 140s.
Buy as much RAM as you can; at a minimum you should double what the old box
had. It's a huge range but get 2-8GB/core. For regular JDE World you can
be a little conservative on the RAM but things like the browser interface
might drive up CPU usage should you choose to enable them. FYI if you want
to run any WebSphere App Server, lean closer to the 8GB/core; some would
argue 2.
As you don't upgrade often, buy as much CPU as you can afford and try for
the most current generation, but as you're coming from an 800 CPW box pretty
much anything will be a huge bump. I don't know about the 520 machines but
we were able to migrate OS licenses from our old 720-2062 to an 830 and
later to a 570. Ditto from a 730 to a 570. If you can still do that, your
OS license cost should be minimized. Speaking of, if you can transfer the
OS licenses, see if you can get a dual-core on your new box. With no OS
license cost the hardware would be relatively cheap and your performance
would shoot through the roof. Talk to your BP about it; it's been a long
time since I dealt with it.
A JDE comment: As I'm sure you're aware, JDE jobs don't take advantage of
SMP so a single job won't use more than one CPU core. That said, having a
multi-core machine is still beneficial in that you can run more jobs
concurrently with less overall drag. That big FASTR won't slow down the
users or the quick PO Print job.
Oh, one more thing: Backups. Get the best tape drive you can. I'm a fan of
LTO. It's fast, reliable, and each generation has upped the capacity and
speed. The latest gen also supports hardware-based encryption. For your
size system, LTO2 is probably fine and could be bought cheap used, but LTO3
or 4 would ensure your backups never take more than one cartridge and backup
downtime window would be reduced.
On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 9:39 AM, phil.seay@xxxxxxxxxx
<phil.seay@xxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
My company is running JDE 7.3 on old equipment and an old release of the
OS. We are finding this situation increasingly expensive and risky.
Hardware support is very expensive and software support is either expensive
because of our software tier or not available. We want to move the
application to modern machines running V5R4.
What approach should I take for getting a pair of machines sized and
priced? We have a big enough budget for two 520 P10's. Any recommendations
for hardware vendors are greatly appreciated.
We have (basically) two of the following set up as a replication pair:
9406-720-2063 w/ 1503 interactive feature (P30, 800 CPW, 'Enterprise
Edition' I think)
3 GB memory
5x2748 RAID w/ 26MB write cache
1 TB at 40% usage (4X6713 9GB, 60X6718 17.5GB 10kRPM)
OS/400 V4R5
I gathered disk-busy percentage statistics at 5 minute intervals for a
month and found that we exceeded 15% on any given arm only 30 times (to a
max of 23% once). Our peak user count was 51.
We rented a 520 for an initial feasibility study and have found the
performance very satisfactory at least for batch jobs. We ran the biggest
batch jobs we have against our production data on this machine and found run
times decreased significantly in spite of far fewer arms (which blows my
mind).
9406-520-8953 (P10 2400 CPW)
8 GB memory
1x5709 RAID w/ 16MB write cache
0.5 TB (8x4327 70GB 15kRPM)
OS/400 V5R4
If we buy used machines, how do we acquire the LPP's beyond the OS? What
else should I consider? Many thanks!
Phil
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