Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!helios!bcm!dimacs.rutgers.edu!seismo!uunet!sparky!dsndata!wayne From: wayne@dsndata.uucp (Wayne Schlitt) Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp Subject: LaserRX Message-ID: Date: 4 Feb 91 19:44:09 GMT Sender: wayne@dsndata.UUCP Distribution: comp Organization: Design Data Lines: 37 i just got a flier from HP about their LaserRX product, and i have a few questions that i hope someone can answer... 1) why is it called LaserRX? it doesnt seem to have anything to do with lasers (or cdroms or read/write optical disks which use lasers). 2) i have a nice hp9000/370 sitting on my desk. why am i supposed to buy a pc in order to run LaserRX? (and, of course, i would have to buy another desk to put it on, and maybe a bigger office, and...) can a pc really do something that my HP-UX box cant? if so, does that mean i really should be junking all my HP-UX systems and start developing for the pc instead? 3) what does LaserRX give me that the hp monitor, uptime, iostat, vmstat and unix accounting doesnt already give me? the only think i can think of that they show is pretty color graphs... gee, you would think X windows could do that, but... having come from a mainframe background, i have always been _real_ disappointed with the primitive system performance analysis tools that unix has. the most important one that is missing is some way of figure out how much i/o is going a given file or directory structures so you can figure out how you should split your file system over a series of disk and spread the i/o around. sure, it is _easy_ to balance the disk usage across a bunch of disks, but i want to balance the i/o load across a bunch of disks. will LaserRX help me do this? -wayne