CMOD Z/OS Server Vs CMOD Multiplatform server

[sandeepveldi]

Hi,                                                                     
I'm trying to find what are the differences and limitations of CMOD on Z/OS Vs CMOD on Multiplatform. This might be something that's already   
in the documentation but I couldn't find it. Can anyone please provide or point me to the right documentation to get the details I'm looking for.

Any help on this is highly appreciated.
                                                                       
Thanks & Regards,                                                       
Sandeep Veldi       

[Ed_Arnold]

Sandeep - I'm not aware, offhand, of such a document.

As the product really is a common code base across all supported operating systems I would not be surprised to see almost no difference, functionally.

I think of the differences as being what is the difference in the operating systems themselves?  Yes, I'm a z guy, have been for a long time, so I have a bias.

Here are a few questions for you: 

• When you go on a disaster recovery exercise, does one operating system platform typically get up and running quicker than others?
• When an applications group is talking about bringing a new app online, do they waste time worrying about where they're going to find the capacity?
• Do you ever worry about scalability issues?

[sandeepveldi]

Ed,
Thanks for your response. I'm just looking for functional differences between these two versions of CMOD. Sounds like there are none apart from the change in commands etc.

Thanks
SV

[LWagner]

Sandeep:

There are differences with CMOD on other platforms.  I am currently a mainly z/OS CMOD installation, but the customer bills were re-designed, and went from a simple AFP to a PDF format. 

We are not current on z/OS, still at 1.9, so our DB2 is back versioned, requiring a back version of CMOD, on version 8.4.0.3.  PDF indexing is completely impractical for us in z/OS. I tried a file of 3% of our bills, and it abended after over two hours.  Using 8 virtual Windows servers, we have our 60,000 bills per day broken down to an average of 500+ files per day, and these are all indexed, processed and loaded in 90 - 120 minutes.

There may also be an upper limit of how many documents per day can be served on different platforms, and of course that is CPU and MIPs dependent.  With CMOD 2.1 on the same CPU, we struggled to serve about 3,000 documents a day.  With the upgrade to CMOD 8.4.0.3, we can handle to about 12,000, but performance is terrible at about 25 transactions per minute.

As mentioned we send about 60,000 bills a day, and average about 9,500 online views.  Most bills are still mailed by U.S.P.S.  We are going to move the Bill application to AIX, to reduce mainframe contention, and we hope improve the presented transaction rate.  This is important as we are going from from bi-monthly billing to monthly billing, and need to anticipate 16,000 hits or more per day.  Monthly billing is totally dependent on the CMOD switch to AIX for this, plus the 8.5 CMOD handles PDF indexing better, requiring, we estimate only 7% of the storage we are now using in Z/OS and CMOD 8.4.0.3, currently about 94% of a TB for 4 months bills. 

So there are definite platform and OS dependencies.

Larry Wagner
City of Los Angeles
Dept of Water & Power

[Ed_Arnold]

(laughing) Larry - can't let your update go without a comment.

I'll concede the point about PDF indexing on LUW (Linux/Unix/Windows) is much more efficient than on z/OS.

But for the other items, if you're current with 8.5 and DB2 and got a smokin' z/OS system then CMOD throughput absolutely kicks whatever.

(Larry and I have known each other for years.  Absolutely no animosity - always good to hear from you, Larry.)   

[LWagner]

    ahaahahahahahahahaha

Ed:

I'm sure you've got the smokin'est IBM z/OS this side of the galaxy available, could handle a Googol of hits per second if required.

I'm at a utility under the gun to shave costs, with hundreds or thousands of miles of 100 year old water mains in the ground that need replacement, and I don't know how many 10's of thousands of transformers on a 50 year replacement cycle, while people keep adding more electronic stuff to their homes, and wonder why circuits blow and transformers explode.

So we lose mainframe MIPs to what we need on a 24 hour rolling average.

Its the accountants. Really.  I'd like a smokin' hot z/OS.  I could write an excellent justification.