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System i Model 720 Found Fit for Double Duty at Discovery Toys
Discovery Toys of Livermore, California, had a CISC based System i model F70 as their production system, and a RISC based Model S20/2170 as their development system. With the peak season still several months away, and with Y2K compliance just around the corner, Sal Sanchez, a consultant at Discovery, knew he needed to move his production environment from CISC to RISC, and soon. But what Mr. Sanchez didn't know was whether his Model S20 development server could absorb the production workload. Said Mr. Sanchez, "We knew we had some horsepower and DASD left unused in the S20, but we didn't really know how the production workload would move over. First, the production box is CISC technology and the S20 is RISC. Secondly, we knew the S20, as a server, wasn't really designed for interactive work." Sanchez continued, "So we really needed a tool that could deal with combining workloads, modeling CISC workloads onto RISC processors, and that could also model interactive work on server processors."
Sanchez and his outsourcing contractor, EDS, found Midrange Performance Group's Performance Navigator product in an ad in News/400 Magazine. After a brief discussion with MPG, Discovery Toys purchased licenses for Performance Navigator for both their System i products. Discovery Toys had spent considerable time agonizing over the questions of:
- Would the S20 handle the combined workloads of development and production?
- And if not, what new upgrade model would be required?
- In addition, Discovery Toys wanted to make sure that whatever upgrade server was required would have sufficient DASD and memory to do the job.
- And perhaps most important, would the new server have the correct 'interactive feature card'?
- Another concern was, although they would have ample disk space on the new box, would they have enough disk arms to support a production load?
The specifications for Performance Navigator indicated that the product would answer all 5 questions. However, with the 'season' and the millenium looming, Sanchez approached MPG with a request to provide not only the product, but also services to size and spec out a recommended target server upgrade. Said Sanchez, "We had already spent a lot of time wrestling with this set of complex variables before we found MPG. I really wanted to have our new box installed over Labor Day weekend. We felt we were behind our schedule, so we retained MPG to help us speed up the process."
Sanchez continues: "MPG logged onto our systems, pulled our performance data out into their system, and did the analysis and sizing work from Boulder. Once MPG had our data captured, we had our answers in a matter of hours." MPG provided Discovery Toys with a target upgrade from the S20 to a model 720, including the correct interactive feature, the DASD configuration, and memory size. Said Sanchez, "We knew we needed an upgrade. We just had not been able to get comfortable with which of the new server models to buy, which interactive card, which memory, how much DASD, etc." He continued, "MPG not only has the technology to do this accurately, but their Performance Navigator product puts it all into graphs that anybody can understand. Our outsourcing contractor, our financial people, anybody can look at the before and after graphs and see that we are doing the right thing. MPG helped us move from confused and concerned to confident and comfortable in a matter of a day and a half." Sanchez concludes, "We bought Performance Navigator to manage ongoing performance. If we had had the luxury of more time, we could have used Performance Navigator to correctly size the new upgrade by ourselves. But we wanted a 'second opinion', and MPG are the experts." Sanchez observed, "We might do an upgrade exercise once every 2 years, but MPG does them every day. It doesn't cost a lot to go with the pros."
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