RE: DASD upgrade - an endless problem

AS/400s only connection to EMC or Shark is the old, slow 6501 controller.
The IBM Shark folks were up front about AS/400 connectivity -- They said you
could do it, but you probably wouldn't want to.  The EMC sales guys
suggested that the performance of the 6501 might be offset by the
performance benefits of the EMC array.  We came to the conclusion that we
would use a SAN for our NT and Unix systems only.

We had hoped that the long awaited fibre channel support announcements would
open up the AS/400 up to SAN solutions.  Unfortunately V5R1 fibre channel
support appears to only provide the statement of direction.

If you think Shark is expensive you should price EMC.  When we brought in
IBM, EMC, and Compaq for SAN quotes EMC came in the highest, by far.  EMC's
idea of bargaining was to offer a deal on their older models.

There's a startup/infrastructure cost for SAN technology that makes it
prohibitively expensive for smaller arrays.  We felt that 2 Terabytes was
the break even point for the killer SANs such as Shark and EMC, but that was
over a year ago.

I attended an IBM Rochester factory tour about a year ago.  The guide
pointed to an AS/400 system running some aspect of the manufacturing
process.  It had a couple terabytes of storage strung out in 25 or so feet
of storage expansion units.  You'd think that after walking around and past
the system for a few months one of the engineers might have said, "The
customers have got to HATE this..."

James Damato
Manager - Technical Administration
Dollar General Corporation
<mailto:jdamato@dollargeneral.com>


-----Original Message-----
From: Admin AS400 [mailto:as400admin@canadelle.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2001 3:20 PM
To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
Subject: DASD upgrade - an endless problem


Hello all

On our main production 720 machine, we made 3 disk upgrades in 3 years,
going from 70 GB to 180 GB, then to 280 GB, then to 480 GB. The system has
now 2 disk expansions and looks more and more as an old mainframe, a long
line of black boxes.

Last upgrade was made 9 months ago and we sized it for at least 2 years.
This was theory. Despite data purges and applying all known management
tricks for system & applications, we are now again deep in DASD crisis. We
need at least 400 GB more.

Our first scenario is to replace old drives with bigger ones. We work the
digits now.

The second way is to use an EMC external storage system (don't know anything
about them) or an IBM Enterprise Storage System (ESS or Shark).

Questions:

1 - has anybody worked with EMC external storage solutions OF THIS SIZE
(about 400 GB) on the AS/400 ? What's the performance, how it reacts to
microcode upgrades, are there any advantages or drawbacks ?

2 - has anybody worked with an ESS (Shark) on the AS/400 ? Are there any
major problems, except the HUGE price ? IBM Canada was unable to tell us if
any North American client has ever tried it ...


Thanks in advance

Andrei Centea
Sara Lee Branded Apparel of Canada - Montreal

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