CISC to RISC upgrade

It was the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day and everyone was excited about
installing the new RISC computer at Wolohan Lumber.  It was a typical save of
the entire system, nothing exciting.  The disk drives had been prepared for a
replace-a-release.  The CE came in and did his thing.  Now,  the long IPL
started.  After about 12 hours of IPLing the system just seemed to hang.
 Things
did not look like they should.  The transition support center was called but
they were off for the weekend.  Nice!  Now no support from IBM on the
upgrade.
It appeared like a hardware failure, so hardware support was called.  A guy
from
the IBM printer division called and said that he had not heard of a 530/2151
printer.  Great.  The only one that was available for CISC to RISC help was
Peter O’Connor from PAE Inc.  His product, PC/Accelerator for the PowerPC,
was
being used to help cut down the time of the upgrade.  

The sum of the problem was 4 power supplies were replaced, 1 disk drive
problem,
a loose cable to a drive and wrong mirco code on the EMC drive.
 Unfortunately,
getting all of these things fixed and the problems discovered took time.
 March
17 had come and gone without the system being up.  A disaster was called and
a
320  system was shipped in.  During this entire time, PAE kept in constant
touch
to see if they could be of assistance.

Finally, the RISC was up and running.  ESTOBJCVN had calculated that object
conversion was going to take 19 hours and 45 minutes.  PAE’s PC/Accelerator
was
started up to do the object conversion.  No one was looking forward to 19
more
hours.  Finally, something good happened.  PAE’s PC/Accelerator did the
object
conversion in a little less than 4 hours.  The was more than an 80% saving of
time.  Two things went correctly, PAE was available for support and
PC/Accelerator reduce object conversion time dramatically.   This was at
least a
good ending.

Paul

Cisco Systems

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