Re: OS400 DATA MIGRATION

Richard,

> I was speaking of cheaper in the sense of lost time, risk of lost data if
> the machine dies while running unprotected, risk of lost data if one of the
> backup tapes decides to be unreadable - that kind of cheaper.

  Indeed IF a) A disk fails during the upgrade, and b) BOTH copies of
his backup are bad, then he is in deep deep weeds indeed.
 
> In my opinion, people sometimes spend too much time worrying about hardware
> cost.  How much would the expansion unit cost and what feature/function
> would he get for it?  (that's a real question, not rhetorical)

  As I recall-ball park-prices for a 50xx tower (Quote me NOT on these
numbers!!)  $13,000 a 5052 top hat $5500, a 6533 DASD controller $9,900.
May need a #2688(?) to drive the fiber to the expansion cabinet $2,500. 
Add to that space, power, heat, and annual maintenance and it gets
pretty expensive for sure.

  Certainly compared to the failure above (if it happens) it's cheap.

  On the other hand if your tape drive writes two unusable copies of a
backup tape consecutively without throwing an error of some kind then
you likely have rust for backup for some time back.  While I recognize
that tape errors do exist I have done dozens and dozens of system
migrations with tape and cannot remember a single tape error stopping a
conversion. Conditions are optimal - the tapes never change temp or
humidity. The same drive that wrote them has to read them. The drive is
intentionally cleaned before each save. New or nearly new tapes are
prodently used. It don't get any better'n nat!

  If the risk of missing data is evaluated -vs- the cost of the
expansion I suspect most risk managers will accept it.

>  How much
> will a decent developer cost for the next year?  I would guess about
> $100,000 with desk, floor space, phone, PC, wages, overhead, machine cycles
> to support him, parking spot, and so forth.  How much will it cost to
> rebuild the world if the backup turns out to be unreadable?  How much will
> it cost in hours for the OP to fix if that happens?  How much will it cost
> the business in lost opportunity while their people cannot use the system?

  I have been involved with system recovery when a drive failed and
backups were junk. (In this case flat were not done and nobody was told.
THe tape was labeled, logged, and in the vault but was empty!)  We had
to restore the OS and major componants from 5 YEAR old tapes! (no errors
but there were more than a few things missing).  Their nightly backups
had not been updated for new products or program libraries in the 5
years  I never saw the estimated cost to the business but it was 6
figures by the end of day 1 for sure. Major function restoral took three
days, complete restoral took over a week.

  This mess had NOTHING to do with tape failure, rather it was
Operational Error.

  Again, my .02.

   - Larry

-- 
Larry Bolhuis
Arbor Solutions, Inc.
(616) 451-2500
(616) 451-2571 -fax
lbolhuis@arbsol.com
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