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Re: Informix on HP-UX11i

 
yc_2
Regular Advisor

Re: Informix on HP-UX11i

Hi Steve Lewis,

>>Solaris systems don't quite have the same >>cpu horsepower as HP-UX, they make up for >>it by packing more cpus into the box. So I >>would say you are better off with HP.

Could you share the above? I'm looking for justification to my management as Solaris is selling much cheaper.
Steve Lewis
Honored Contributor

Re: Informix on HP-UX11i

No.

The reason is that it depends on many things.
For example:

How big is the box -how many cpus, memory, controllers, storage, what is the relative speed of the cpus?
What is it used for?
what is the profile of the application?
What are your staff skilled in?
If you want to plug in another application, which platforms is that ported to?

Taking all these things into account, Sun may be cheaper, Linux may be cheaper still, for a small machine.

The point I was making is this: All other things being equal, if Sun offered me a 16cpu machine for less than the cost of a 8cpu HP9000, then I would still go for the HP if I was running Informix, in a single instance scenario.

You have a very difficult choice to make!






Jason Dinsdale
Frequent Advisor

Re: Informix on HP-UX11i

YC,

I recently did a less-than comprehensive assessment of lower-end Sun and HP servers to replace our aging L class dual-processor system. In our case the majority of our performance problems were disk I/O related (too few locally-attached SCSI disks in a Jamaica disk enclosure) and so a SAN was mandatory, but our L class was also out of warranty and so there was a large amount of financial pressure (AU$1K per month) to buy a new server as well. I therefore went out to HP's solutions centre here to benchmark our database (Informix 921) and data against the various configurations of hardware which included:

- 4-way Zeon (DL580) running Linux ... with local disks not too bad bang for the buck, but with SAN it was horrible purely becuase of a) poor driver support and b) because it was so easy to step outside the 'supported configuration' boundaries. Quickly ruled out.

- 2-way RP5470 (running PA8700 with SAN) ... this was a real performer (compared to our L class) but monitoring using Glance indicated that the key reason was the lack of disk I/O bottleneck which meant that the server could run at maximum throughput, with both CPUs flat out. To prove the point, we dynamically added a 3rd CPU and the benchmark runtime decreased linearly with the increase in CPU power.

- 2-way Itanium 1.5GHz (RX2600 with SAN). This was the star performer and beat everything else by some margin. However, application support (Informix, Data Protector) was lacking and so it ruled out this processor in our situation. Sad thing is that it was cheaper too...

- We also seperately benchmarked a Sun v240 (dual USparc 1GHz IIIe) which was not a bad system at all, and performed comparably, but we were put off by the limited scalability and upgradability (you cant simply throw in later CPUs to get a boost in performance). Last nail in the coffin was the recent bad press on the Sun processor roadmap.

In the end we went with a SAN and the successor of the RP5470, the RP3440, since the PA8800 chips are dual core (so you can run 4 cores with 2 'sockets' as HP calls it) and it's also identical to the RX2600 in terms of motherboard etc so later you are supposed to be able to drop in Itanium CPUs and hey-presto you have an Itanium server. Point to note also; HP have just released the dual-core Itanium called the MX2 ... which looks to be a teriffic performer. Once app support catches up with the platform, then later we'll be able to migrate to the Itanium platform without buying a whole new server which is very attractive. In summary, the HP kit was slightly more expensive than the Sun kit, but we felt it was more 'future-proofed', particularly with Itanium in the ascendancy.

Hope this helps,

Jason
If a man talks in a forest and there is no woman to hear, is he still wrong?
Tim D Fulford
Honored Contributor

Re: Informix on HP-UX11i

Hi

Ravi... Informix is NOT end of life, it is still being actively developed & supported. It is probably true that some time in the future DB2 and Informix will merge, but there are no dates on this and it is planed to be an engine upgrade, as opposed to full data and engine migration.

As far as what is supported on 11i.. 7.3x & 9.2x (with the possible exception of 7.31) are no longer supported by IBM BUT certain versions do work on HP-UX 11.x. Currently supported vrsuions are 9.3x & 9.4x

Informix have different compaltion methods. UC, HC & FC;
o UC is 32-bit and not compatable (supported) with 11.x (but is with HP-UX 10.20)
o HC is a 32-bit compalation for 11.x (64 bit & 32-bit)
o FC is 64-bit compalation and only compatable with 11.x 64-bit.
o I do not know if there is specific compalation for Itanium servers... We have not got that far yet

I have no experience of Sun over HP. But I tend to lean in the HP direction because that is what I know..

Regards

Tim
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Jason Dinsdale
Frequent Advisor

Re: Informix on HP-UX11i

Tim,

You're absolutely correct - Informix is not end of life at all, but as you say IBM are merging the best Informix features into DB2 and so at some point in the future Informix will cease to be developed further, but I think that's some way off ... 9.5 is in the works and 9.6 also as I understand it so there should be several years of active development yet.

I'm in the middle of negociating an OEM agreement with IBM right now and they'll be presenting their product roadmap to me in the next couple of weeks; I will pass on any relevant info to the forums.

I can tell you from my recent work that IBM uses the same naming convention for Itanium, in that the version that they support (9.4 only) has an FC designation (64 bit on 11.x, as you would expect).

Jason
If a man talks in a forest and there is no woman to hear, is he still wrong?