[nylug-talk] Comparing RISC with CICS processor

[Gary Mort]

Paul Robbins wrote:
> Gary,
> It really just comes down to what you are trying to do with the hardware. I
> work for a retail chain which deploys 233MHz and 375MHz RISC systems.
> Although this is some extremely antiquated hardware, it allows us the
> performance we need.  The real key that we noticed with old RISC hardware
> was upgrading RAM. The change in RAM makes a much more dramatic difference
> for our application than a change in processor speed.
>
> On that same note, I am trying to convince them to move away from AIX on the
> RISC to Linux on an x86 box. In my initial R&D work (with a 1.5GHz PIII, i
> think) is that the applications run much faster, but it is hard to make a
> direct comparison since it is two difference OS's running on different
> platforms.  If you are running Linux on PPC and are looking to move to an
> intel or AMD box running an x86 version of Linux, I think again you are
> going to find it hard to compare since the setup is so different.
>
> I know this might just be random rambling, but if you want, i would be happy
> to talk to you about the what I notice as the key difference in the
> application processing for the two systems.
>   


Mainly, I've got a lot of database driven apps that are currently 
running on Windows on old Pentiums.
Also, keep in mind, I say databases, we're talking 10-20 databases 
mainly between 50MB and 250MB in size.  These things are small.

The systems are crud, the operating system has been compromised six ways 
to sunday due to the poor decisions of the group(everyone logs on with 
the same admin userid) and they insist that this is the only way they 
can write their apps.

We need to replace the system, and I'm looking to move them to a unix 
environment where they will be forced to start thinking about security 
just a bit.

I'm somewhat limited due to the nature of available hardware and 
software to AIX on a RISC box.  There are a ton of virtually free 
systems with 450 processors that they can get(hardware that has been 
upgraded and is available within the company for the cost of transport 
from the location it's stored at to their location)- but without having 
one on hand I can't compare programs from one system to the other to see 
if we have performance issues.

For a SMALL amount of money, they can get a monster RISC box with 16 
1.6G processors. 


They also have an extremely small time window to do this upgrade in a 
reasonable manner.

I'd rather get them to upgrade to the more expensive box because if it 
runs well than I can encourage them to move the rest of their cruddy 
code onto this server and do away with windows entirely.