Re: Disk upgrade and IOP compatibility - followup

Many years ago, I did some study of third party drives.  As it turns out,
the third party drives "look like" IBM hardware, so the AS/400 attempts to
download the fixes to the third party hardware on IPL.  As the third party
drives never really get the upgrade, it is redownloaded on every subsequent
IPL, forevermore slowing down the IPL process.  (The slow down in fact is
trivial, but every extra second helps.)

The third parties sometimes upgrade their own code using patches that
typically physically reside on "e-proms" in the hardware, causing the
AS/400 to now think that the PTF was applied.

One of the reasons that customers chose AS/400s to run their businesses is
that they are buying one integrated product from one company.  When the
logical product breaks, you make one service call and say "please fix it".
(It should be noted that there are times that the first of those three
words is omitted.)  AS/400s keep you out of the computer business, and
doing your own business.

Al

Al Barsa, Jr.
Barsa Consulting Group, LLC

400>390

914-251-1234
914-251-9406 fax

http://www.barsaconsulting.com
http://www.taatool.com





                                                                                
                                         
                    Larry Bolhuis                                               
                                         
                    <lbolhuis@arbsol.co        To:     MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com  
                                         
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                    Sent by:                   Subject:     Re: Disk upgrade 
and IOP compatibility - followup            
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                    04/16/01 03:44 PM                                           
                                         
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William,

  Do remember that occasionally IBM sends PTFs that actually end up
getting downloaded to the drives. This does not happen for 3rd party
drives (or more correctly, when it does the results are as they say
"unpredicable"). It is possible that some of the PTFs may be for the
drives to work with your controller (as opposed to the controller
working with your drives) in which case they will have no affect on the
3rd party drives.

 - Larry

> I called for an IBM service call (at hi$), talked to the CE (or whatever
> they're called now) on the phone, hopefully before I get a huge bill, and
he
> recommended a new ptf package - MF23265 (v4r4) or MF23266 (v4r5) - which
> just came out and specifically addresses the new bigger 10K drives.  And,
> plundering around pretty deep in SST, I did find that the reported 675A
is
> really a 2745 IOP.  This is pretty new, I believe, and is reportedly a
> really good controller.  Must've got it when I upgraded my CPU a couple
> months ago...they are on the same backplane now.


--
Larry Bolhuis                  | Cogito ergo mercari iSeries
Arbor Solutions, Inc.          |
(616) 451-2500                 |                    (I think, therefore I
buy iSeries.)
(616) 451-2571 -fax       |
lbolhuis@arbsol.com       |        #3  1951-2001
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