The performance characteristics of an Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) engine were compared to a general purpose CP in a zSeries environment.

Given the substantially discounted prices of the zSeries® Integrated Facility for Linux® (IFL) engines, some customers are questioning if they deliver performance that is equivalent to the general CPs. To dispel these concerns, a series of measurements were conducted at an IBM facility.

An application was run under WebSphere® V5.1 on Linux using a back-end DB2® database on z/OS®. The same tests were conducted on two different hardware configurations. In the first configuration, the Linux guest was run under z/VM® on a z990 LPAR with four dedicated IFL engines. In the second configuration, four dedicated general purpose CPs were substituted for the IFLs. Performance metrics showed equivalence between the two configurations.

Here is the configuration:

Here is a graph of the results showing equivalent capacity: