AS/400-->iSeries: Upgrading from V3R2 to V5R2 (the rest of y ou can delete this message)

[Whittall, Conrad]

Hello David,

I'm not sure about how your performance will work out, but I remember
working with a couple of AS/400 customer many years back who both upgraded
and saw a significant improvement in response times. The trick is, as
always, getting the balance right between the interactive and batch pools.

Another good piece of news for you is that, assuming you're installing the
same version of PowerHouse on your new machine, you can simply backup your
PowerHouse application files (PDC dictionary, QUICK screens, QUIZ reports,
and QTP runs) from your old machine and restore them to the new one and they
will run. No recompilation needed. This is because the internal format of
the PowerHouse files is identical, regardless of whether PowerHouse is
running on a CICS or RISC processor-based AS/400 or iServer.

IBM did such a good job with the AS/400 hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and
the Integrated Language Environment (ILE) that I seem to remember that
Cognos was very pleasantly surprised when we received our first RISC-based
AS/400, and found that we didn't even have to recompile PowerHouse to run on
the new architectures. So long as certain files created by the ILE C
compiler were included in the installation kit (which they were...PowerHouse
has been built with ILE C since version 5.87), the single product could be
loaded onto either type of machine and run at native speed. This is because
ILE compiles programs for the HAL rather than for a specific processor, and
the system's microcode takes care of translating the virtual machine
instructions into physical hardware instructions. So far as I remember this
is how every piece of software on the AS/400 and iSeries servers is
built...compiled for the HAL and interpreted by the microcode for the
specific processor in the current system. Very elegant!

Best regards,
Conrad

Conrad Whittall
e-Learning Architect, Global Education Services
Cognos Incorporated, 3755 Riverside Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, K1G 4K9, Canada

-----Original Message-----
From: David Morrison - Corporate [mailto:dmorrison@mcbrideelectric.com]
Sent: 6 December 2002 12:03
To: powerh-l@lists.swau.edu
Subject: AS/400-->iSeries: Upgrading from V3R2 to V5R2 (the rest of you
can delete this message)


We're finally getting a new IBM server!  

My question for the user group:  

Have you run into any issues with going from a CISC processor to a RISC
processor?  Is there anything we're going to need to do with respect to
PowerHouse, other than re-compiling our programs?

Our new processor has a much higher overall CPW rating than our old
processor, but most of the "juice" will be going to batch processing (mainly
due to IBM's pricing model).   If the interactive portion of the CPW rating
is less than the total CPW on the old processor, any idea what we can expect
for interactive response?  We've seen Performance Monitor graphs that show
how much better things will be; can we trust that?  Are there any
performance issues that we should be aware of here?

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

David Morrison
McBride Electric


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