NeoSort
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What products are required to support NeoSort?
Answer: NeoSort must be installed with NeoBatch, but as we provide the two together, that is not an issue you need to think about. Otherwise NeoSort has no special requirements. Depending on the amount of sorting you perform and the potential benefits of reducing sort times, you may want to experiment with different hardware configurations (number of processors, number of disks, amount of memory) to see what setup gives you the best performance.
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Do I have to make any changes to my SORT statements for them to work with NeoSort?
Answer: The majority of SORT statement options are supported. If you think you are using an uncommon option, you can check with us and we’ll let you know if it is supported.
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How do you justify your claims that NeoSort is so fast?
Answer: In 2006 we set a new world record for the Minute Sort test by sorting 40 GB of data (400 million 100-byte records) in less than 1 minute. Admittedly that was on a high end Windows server, so we checked again recently on a more typical 2 x Xeon quad core server setup and sorted 15GB in a minute. We think this is a very respectable figure as most mainframe users experience something in the range of 0.5 to 2GB per minute speeds.
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Mainframes are clearly faster than Windows-based servers, so how can you claim your customers experience shorter batch execution times off the mainframe?
Answer: It probably is true that the latest mainframe is faster than the latest Windows-based server. However, most organizations are not using the latest mainframe and could not afford it if they wanted it. They are therefore moving their applications to Windows servers from mainframes that are at least a few years old. It is not difficult for them to purchase servers that out perform their current hardware for a fraction of the cost it would take to upgrade to the latest mainframes – helped, of course, by the performance characteristics of our software.
