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Content by McGill Systems Inc. (original archived HERE)
As of October 22, 1994, the MUSIC/SP product
development and support group is running MUSIC entirely from an IBM PS/2 Model
95 computer. (Our model uses a 60 MHz Pentium processor.) There are 12 dial-in
lines and TCP/IP connections that connect us to our world-wide user community.
We converted from an IBM 9375 Model 60 mainframe. The PS/2 has the
P/370 Card and 370 channel card in it to allow us
to run the same applications and the same operating systems as we were running
on the mainframe.
The first thing visitors to our office notice is just how small the new
machine is compared with the old one! Even though it is so much smaller it is
more than twice as fast for our average programs. We have seen up to three
times the file transfer speed when we are using FTP to transfer files from
remote hosts.
The disks are faster, smaller and much less expensive than the old ones. We
took advantage of the RAID 5 option on the PS/2 which allows the system to keep
running even if a disk drive stops working. It also allows us to remove a bad
disk and plug a new one in while our applications continue to run.
From the financial perspective the purchase cost of the machine is about the
list price for one year's maintenance of the mainframe. And the PS/2's price
includes maintenance for 3 years.
The electrical power is much less and we now afford to have an
uninterruptible power supply to ride us over short power outages and line
glitches.
Full pack backups are now done using a PC program going to a tiny 4 GB tape
cartridge. We could continue to use mainframe-type tapes but the new one holds
much more, is much smaller and backs up the PC files too.
As you can imagine we are very pleased with our new machine!
Contact
us if you want to know more about running MUSIC/SP on a PC or RS/6000
platform.
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