RE: V5R2 and V5R3

["Jones, John \(US\)" <John.Jones@xxxxxxxxxx>]

For your size shop, I think it'd be more cost effective to have a
thoroughly tested backup plan instead of the RAID.  I'm assuming that:

1. You'd back up daily (or at least religiously whatever the interval
might be) and could stand the loss of a day's data/productivity (have to
assume when a drive fails, it'll be 2 minutes before the daily backup
starts).
2. You can stand to be down long enough to get the drive replaced.
Since you're paying for HW maint, that should only be a few hours as
long as your local IBM parts depot stocks your model drive, but could
possibly mean an overnight wait for a shipmnet.

On the backups, unless you off-site them daily, you could get away with
appending backups to the same tape so you wouldn't need to spend your
savings on media.

Just, above all, test your restores now and again.


Only you can say if you need the extra CPW & RAM.  Ironically, if you're
only after a small boost in performance, adding the add'l disk arms for
the RAID might be all the boost you need.  Depends on your workload;
time to do some serious performance monitoring.