RE: SRCB7006956 Power 9 9009-42A

Jack,
TR's come out twice a year. For 7.4 the odd ones in the fall and the even one in the spring. The even one seems to come out 2-3 weeks (or less) after our March downtime typically happens so we normally apply it in June. Our June downtime was a cluster f(lop). Our VTL had issues which caused us to abort a lot of critical upgrades. They got postponed to our next quarterly downtime in September. September downtime happens a week later than normal due to Labor Day. This time it was just late enough to get TR5.
But, no, I do not typically skip cumes, or TR's. We do our downtimes quarterly and put on the latest cume and groups as of normally the Friday before.
We try to schedule our downtime the second weekend of the month we do it based on an ancient incident in which an executive scheduled a crew to come in for month end work on the first weekend and ended up in tears when I told her it was downtime. This was before we had H/A machines, etc.
This year it was March 13, June 12, September 18 (I hate doing downtime during a short week), and December 11.
We normally do the upgrades on our P8 on Monday or Tuesday. The P9-41A on Wednesday or Thursday. The P9-42A on Saturday.
If we could get a scale out P10 I would upgrade one of those P9's and try to roll it down hill and replace that P8. With 7.2 as the last release to support P6's and 7.3 as the last release to support P7's I believe IBM started a trend but I've yet to get them to announce that and update the planning site at:
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/687283


Rob Berendt