This is just good, old fashioned marketing, most of which I never read anymore. Why make things hard? Show a ridiculous return without even talking about a competitor. Good stuff.
Take note – we spend way too much time on making things way too complicated and end up with way too little to show for it. Simple is good. The only thing wrong with this is the headline – they should have scrapped it for the secondary line.
Mainframe Customer Adds Flash Drives to EMC Symmetrix DMX and Significantly Reduces Time to Complete Batch Jobs
Use of Flash Drives Avoids 1,000 MIPS Upgrade and Saves about $2.5M
The Situation
A large European financial services firm needed to reduce its month-end batch processing window. The customer was unable to run the next day's billing cycle if the monthly batch ran long, which would cause it to miss its SLAs and face significant other costs. The customer planned to swap its older IBM mainframe for a new IBM Z10 mainframe with 1,000 more MIPS to address this issue.
The EMC Solution
The customer asked EMC to simulate its monthly batch processing workload and analyze the benefits of adding Flash drives to its Symmetrix DMX-4. The results showed the customer that Flash could reduce its month-end batch processing time significantly. The customer then asked EMC to conduct a proof-of-concept (POC). The POC determined that replacing 54 73GB, 15k fibre channel drives with 16 Flash drives would dramatically decrease the time required to complete the batch jobs. With Flash drives added to the customer's Symmetrix DMX-4, the I/O rate increased by 50% and the batch jobs finished several hours earlier. Based on the POC the customer determined that it could purchase a Z10 with the same number of MIPS as the machine it was replacing, rather than with one with an additional 1,000 MIPS it would have otherwise needed.
Once the new Z10 with faster CPUs was installed, the I/O rate increased to 16,000, thus maximizing Flash drive performance with a new mainframe that was no longer I/O bound. Additionally, the customer was able to reduce the number of logical volumes from almost 300 to 80 larger volumes, simplifying the environment and helping reduce the customer's UCB (unit control block) count.
The Results
The customer purchased 16 EMC Flash drives for its mainframe environment. This performance enhancement improved the response time from 5ms to less than 1.5ms on average and reduced the batch window by 5 hours. The customer saved about $2.5M in deferred hardware and software licensing costs by purchasing a faster mainframe with the same number of MIPS. The customer has ordered 16 additional Flash drives to accelerate risk management and other performance sensitive applications.
I like it! Mud-slinging isn't the only way to succeed, especially if you've got a tangible benefit to offer.
Posted by: Pete Steege | November 19, 2008 at 09:45 AM