Re: Ownership won't agree to an upgrade

[DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

If I recall Jim, didn't we recover that machine TWICE? :-(

I had another customer who had a 3rd party maintenance guy do the same, 
but also have had IBM pull the wrong drive as well. Nobody is perfect!

In the worst case the customer had a RAID set with a dead drive but the 
CSR pulled one of the remaining good drives.... Well formerly good.. 
It's a long story (and featured in COMMON session: "Tales from the Data 
Center") but they were down from Thursday morning to Tuesday noon. Yes 
the problem was created by a human pulling the wrong drive. But along 
the way the problem was exacerbated by yet another drive failing during 
the recovery, a RAID card failing a battery that had only been replaced 
weeks before and a bad tape - yes they wear out too.  Additionally 
further human errors and bad decisions contributed to the long recovery.

Lesson is though: this is the sort of thing that happens as hardware 
ages and that SOB Murphy lines up the failures to happen when they 
matter most.


        - Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 9/7/2017 8:58 AM, Jim Oberholtzer wrote:
> Bob,
>
> How big of a machine is that (storage/memory/processor)?  If it will fit 
> into a P8 4way box (I really bet it will depending on storage) you could 
> be looking at a box for $800/mo WITH maintenance for 36 months.  One of 
> the other posts pointed out that maintenance on a P5 or P6 is going to 
> be more than that in the end.
>
> Now Park Place and a couple of the other hardware maintenance outfits do 
> an OK job with the hardware and do it cheaper than IBM; until the CE 
> they send in replaces the wrong drive, then proceeds to pull the dead 
> drive out (live without the proper actions) and stuff a new drive in 
> it's place and call it done.  Just to add to the anguish, he was an HP 
> UNIX guy, so that's how you replace a drive, right?   Larry Bolhuis and 
> I spent 6 days recovering from that one in northern Indiana a few years 
> back.  Cost the Director of IT her job.  Third party maintenance is 
> cheap, not inexpensive.  I've got lots more like that one to make the 
> point.
>
> --
> Jim Oberholtzer
> Agile Technology Architects
>
> On 9/7/2017 7:47 AM, Bob Cagle wrote:
> > > From: PaulMmn
> > > You're probably not current with upgrades to your 3rd-party 
> > > applications either-- most have given up support for 7.1 by now.  Any 
> > > accounting or payroll packages need annual updates for things like
> > > W-2 forms (or is payroll out-sourced?)?
> > Payroll is outsourced.  We JD Edwards World and we are just one 
> > release behind.  Current version is A9.4 and we are on A9.3.1.
> >
> > Thanks
> >
> > Bob Cagle
> > IT Manager
> > Lynk