Mainframe not a good architecture for interactive was Re: What is the future of COBOL? Answer: Irrelevant???

From: Clark F. Morris, Jr. (cfmtech_at_istar.ca)
Date: 12/11/03 

Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 22:10:44 -0400
To: ibm-main@bama.ua.edu

While cleaning out my drafts folder, I came across this posting that I
vehemently disagree with. While the particular application that Howard
is referring to may have been running abysmally on the mainframe, in
general, given proper tuning and resource allocation, I'll bet on the
IBM mainframe to give very good response time. CICS is currently used
by most large banks because it does provide good response time under
large loads. What size IBM system was the application running on? I
have read of shops that have kept mainframes for 10 - 15 years and in
some cases they still beat the client server du jour. If IBM would ever
learn the meaning of small and get the idea through its head and the
collective heads of the various Independent Software Vendors that 200
mips in 2003 is the same as 20 mips in 1995, you might really see the
mainframe outperform the other platforms for the dollar in the
environments where much of the computing is done. Sub-second response
time is a major goal for many CICS systems. 3000 transactions a second
may not be unusual for some of the larger systems. If personal
computers could actually handle the large data loads and numbers of
transactions for a large bank, we would be seeing a lot more of what
Howard Hinman is talking about.

I have crossposted this to the IBM mainframe listserv to see if they
have more specific comments on this

hhinman wrote:
>
> regarding Pete's comments:
>
> >I read Thane's comments as referring to moving APPLICATIONS from
> >mainframe to Client Server, NOT development.
>
> ..I was discussing both scenarios. Yesterday we tested a CICS to ASP
> migration tool out on a non-production PC server (lowered powered
> machine). Under load testing, the CICS/COBOL application which had been
> converted to ASP.NET is running approximately 9 times faster than the
> mainframe response time. We are getting about 30 transactions per second
> with no tuning or tweaking on a small PC Server hosting the application.
>
> The mainframe is not a good architechure for interactive applications
> because of its communications and such. This is the primary reason the
> PC became so popular as a development platform for mainframe targeted
> applications. It is also the reason that running production applications
> makes even better sense in a PC environment.
>
> Someone posted something about data concerns. It is not difficult or
> overly expensive to create terrabyte data bases in the PC environment. I
> purchased a couple of weeks ago two 120 gig hard drives for $108 each.
> While this might be a bit dangerous to host mission critical
> applications on, using RAID with these drives makes more sense.
> Comparing this to mainframe storage costs is quite astronomical. I
> actually use SCSI Arrays for mission critical applications, but this is
> just an example....
>
> -Howard Hinman
>
> --
> Posted via http://dbforums.com

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