Ken Born asked:

>Greetings,

>Where can I get performance documentation's for these systems?  How does the top of the line 3000's compare to the lower end IBM Mainframes?  

> Future software development proposals would need this data to choose which platform to use.

>Thanks.....

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First let me say that I don't have the performance statistics.

However, I work with both machines and here are my observations (briefly):

For IBM OS/390: It's a good solid machine and still has many packages, particularly in the financial area.
DB/2 is excellent and is rated so by the Gartner Group.
OS/390 has just about everything these days, including the option of running LINUX.
RACF makes OS/390 about the most secure system around; you can't outsmart hackers, but you can outspend them, and that is what IBM has done.
CICS is one of the best transaction processors around (the Gartner Group has good things to say about it), and better yet, it has now gone GUI.

On the negative side, EBCDIC is a real pain to work with for anything considered Open Systems.
Translation to and from ASCII really sucks; FTP can be really interesting--especially running from TSO.
IBM did a white paper on converting the Java Jigsaw Server to OS/390--and it took a year to do--and this was with top flight people doing it.
Getting things to and from the VSAM partition for the HFS is quite a pain too.
Unfortunately, RACF is difficult to work with and sometimes it's so secure, you can't access anything.
RACF takes a lot of class time and experience to make it fly.
The learning curve on products is often frightful, er, uh, challenging.
It takes a long time to develop things, and from my perspective, OS/390 is a little bit clunky and legacy yet.
OS/390 systems have a lot of costs, and even with the improvement in the price for the base OS, it still has a tendency to drain the pocketbook.
This is not to mention that you will need to keep an IBM OS/390 Systems Programmer around just to insure keeping up with patches and customizing the system and analyzing dumps.

The HP e3000 is easy to use and compared to OS/390 and seems to be a lot cheaper (unless you get COGNOS products).
Compared to the IBM OS/390 we have, MPE iX is stable and actually a lot faster; OS/390 typically uses over 40,000 modules to load the operating system, and there are over 10,000 modules in DFP (Data Facility Product--which supports the I/O); here's hoping that you know quite a lot about IBM Basic Assembly Programming.
MPE i/X is a lot more friendly to Open Systems, especially in the last two years or so.
MPE i/X is a LOT easier to administrate! If I were doing full time administration on the IBM Mainframe, I could also handle the HP e3000 at the same time--some things would suffer, but we would keep running.
Image is really great for transaction processing.
Our folks are satisfied using Transact as a standard for all development.
We've found here--and this may be an anomally--that it's easier to move developers into the HP environment than it is to move them from the HP to the IBM environment (although, a lot of banks in the area have provided us a pool of IBM programmers upon which to draw--thanks to closures due to mergers).
The HP e3000 is much more fun to work on!

On the minus side, while you can run relational data bases on the HP e3000, there is somewhat to be desired:
Oracle has given up on providing new versions of their software; Allbase is not as full featured as some would like it to be.

Well, that's about it.
That might not answer the questions you asked, but it may provide you with some clues to the cost of ownership.

I might not always be right, but I always have an opinion. And sometimes, just sometimes, the opinion really is worth something.