V3r2 to V5R3 (The rest of the story)

They are a small wholesale steel distribution business
with less than 20 employees total.

Customer had a 9402-200. We ordered a 9405-520 (Entry model)

The base machine comes with two 35gb drives mirrored up.
We added 2 more 35gb drives in a reasonable amount of time.

We played with getting into DST in a unreasonable amount
of time due to the total lack of NO manuals of any sort.

I finally called support and receive a call back in under 5 minutes.

Got drives installed and mirrored up and went to lunch while they
copied over and balanced up.

Started actual conversion at 1:00pm.

I restored all their libraries in about an hour. I started the
object conversions and had all them finished by 2:30.

We created all user profiles from scratch.

We started live production testing around 3:00.

Sample run times:

End of day processing with updates Old= 8 minutes New= 15 seconds

Detail list of all sales with line items for entire year
with a run time of around 15 minutes. New run time 35 seconds.
This produced a 185 page report.

We did not have a SINGLE program fail for any reason.

This is a VERY quick machine.


The customer was amazed and so was I...

This code and files were 12 years old running on a very old machine.
This was a complete CISC to RISC migration.

We did the entire conversion in less than two hours. The testing
consumed the rest of the time.

We did not have decent internet connections and that of course
killed my ability to get to the famous "Information Center".

This really hurt me on the DST problem. I would have killed for
a paper manual.

Today is their first day on the machine and my telephone has not
made a sound all morning.

I spoke to the guy at 9:00am and he said everything was running fine.