Notes from the Montreal Linux Power Management Mini-Summit

Remember that typically with mainframe applications they charge money based on MIPS cycles. So that the more processor you have the more everything costs. So in a efficiently running mainframe environment with proper setup and accounting you should be running at about 100% cpu 24/7 in order to get the best value.

They are not like PCs were you have the user or I/O as a bottleneck and the CPU spends most of it's time idle... Mainframes tend to have massive amount of I/O and relatively little CPU.

I would still like to have suspend-to-disk capabilities in a mainframe environment however. For various hardware issues and whatnot you do need to plan for downtime occasionally. By being able to suspend the Linux systems to disk then that reduces the downtime. Instead of needlessly wasting CPU time booting up and initializing the system you just load up the memory snapshot, which should be almost always much faster in a system like that.