RE: Since when is adding DASD so difficult?

["Andy Nolen-Parkhouse" <aparkhouse@xxxxxxxxx>]

Konrad,

An appropriate point, and one that had not occurred to me when I
initially responded.  My thoughts below are entirely conjectural and no
one should base any business decisions on them.

Any machine on hardware maintenance should be able to obtain PTF's for
the LIC.  I think that they would be confined to self diagnosis and
would not have access to SupportLine.  If the problem occurs in the OS
or a program product and there is no existing PTF, then IBM's response
could well be as you describe, "Upgrade your software and call us in the
morning".  I don't think that's inappropriate, software eventually does
go off support.

You yourself say that you have made the decision to go without support
and I'm sure that you did so knowing that there were risks as well as
benefits.  I would look at the uniqueness of the plan to determine the
risk.  If I'm doing something that doesn't happen very often in the
iSeries world, then I would be concerned about support.  Assuming that
the V4R4 system has the latest cumulative PTF's, then I would rate the
risk of installing an expansion tower and 17 GB drives as present but
low.

Regards,
Andy Nolen-Parkhouse

> On Behalf Of Konrad Underkofler
> Subject: RE: Since when is adding DASD so difficult?
>
> Andy,
>
> What is IBM's support policy on expired software? I would worry
> that the first answer provided in the event of a failure caused
> by missing some obscure pre-req would be:
>
> 1) Hope you have a good backup
> 2) We don't support 4.2, 4.3, 4.4 etc anymore
>
> We let our software support and software subsription expire
> over a year ago since we were not comfortable with IBM's upgrade
> frequency, lack of usable new OS features and a desire not to pay
> for bug resolution in software we did not use.
>
> Regards
>
> Konrad