It's entirely possible back in those days that you had a tiny LPAR (VM) for your CVS data on a big pSeries box that was shared with a bunch of other resources.

It's entirely possible back in those days that you had a tiny LPAR (VM) for your CVS data on a big pSeries box that was shared with a bunch of other resources. On top of that, it wasn't uncommon to connect those tiny LPARs to shared storage RAID arrays with hundreds of machines on the same array, and allocate them a tiny chunk of two or three disks, and deal with all the contention there. During that time period, I worked for a hot second at EMC, and was always fascinated to see these types of configurations - where it was very clear you could get MUCH better price/performance by buying Linux pizza boxes and connecting them to local storage - but back in those days it was not acceptable at big companies to do that. On the flip side, those pSeries and high-end Sun boxes screamed when they were optimized for high I/O and high performance workloads. 15 years ago, and you'd see clusters of these pSeries boxes processing 400k-500k writes/second and up on Oracle and DB2. Truly impressive stuff for 2000 & 2001.