Hi Ross
We can't allocate the disks in that way I am afraid cos these are not LPAR's in a true sense.
Anyway .....
I got a call back from IBM and this performance is "normal" apparently.
We were comparing the timings with a Solaris server where a script ran in 30 seconds yet on the
AIX server it took 2.5 hours.
We copied some data on another
AIX 5.3 server and the performance was just as bad (good???).
So it looks like there is nothing wrong with our setup as such just that the servers are this much slower that the Solaris ones we have.
IBM said they would try and find some tuning parameters we could tweak to improve the performance but not sure what as yet.
Will let you know when I hear more.
Thanks for your help with this anyway.