Re: Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch

Rob,

Have you considered ordering used DASD? IBM's pricing for the 141 GB drives,
even with the discounted mirroring bundle, was a deal breaker on our last
purchase. I then looked to the used market and was able to find the drives
for roughly half of IBM's list price and salvaged the deal. I could find no
reason to not go the used route since the drives were guaranteed for IBM
maintenance and this machine will always be under a maintenance contract
with IBM. Going this route cut nearly 20K off the purchase price and allowed
us to get the box.


As far as reliability, on one of the new 520s we had a faulty thermal sensor
in the control panel to bring down the entire system (a single point of
failure that aparently cannot be made redundant) . We also reveived a
RAID controller that was DOA on an MES order for another 520. This incident
brought a comment from the IT Director... The 730 never went down; whats up
with the i5s?


Kind regards,

BJ


On 12/13/06, rob@xxxxxxxxx <rob@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I agree that the disk is terribly overpriced.  I have an urgent project to
archive Domino email to a cluster of two Domino servers on Windows and
Linux.  The i5 disk is getting way too expensive.  Especially when one of
your Domino cluster boxes is a 270-DSD that has the maximum number of
drives, and the largest drives, supported on it with the maximum expansion
supported on it.
What will happen to that 270 in the long term?  Well, since V5R4 is the
last version supported on it and we won't be running anything as old as
V5R4 a year after it's follow on is available it will be going out the
door.

Serious storage condition may exist. Press HELP.
Serious storage condition may exist. Press HELP.
Serious storage condition may exist. Press HELP.
Serious storage condition may exist. Press HELP.

When my boss starts migrating stuff off to less expensive hardware you
better believe that's something.

Reliability?  Kinda iffy on that.  Lots more problems lately.  Could be
any number of things:
- Getting the box to do more and more things increases complexity
- Newbie dweeb programmers don't give a rip about quality
- Crud being ported from other systems and stuffed into PASE and being
labled "native" when it is even less native than S/36 environment.  We
don't expect Linux or PC-XT to run CICS or i5 based RPG applications, why
should we think that wedging it in is a good idea?  They rewrote Domino
for the i5 and it kicks a$$.  If they had to do it over again they
probably would have done it in PASE and it would suck swamp water.

Support?  Just try getting support from IBM on why Linux running on a lpar
on a 570, that uses an IBM SAN switch to communicate to an IBM tape drive
reconfigs the tape drives after every IPL and you have to manually
reconfig the buggers in TSM.  Have full maintenance on 570.  Have
maintenance on SAN switch, have maintenance on 3582 (and you do NEED
that).  Now IBM wants an additional $10,000 for SAN support.  Just for
this simple set up!!!???
Radar O'Reilly:  "I don't think what he said is physically possible."
Hawkeye:  "You're right - he does have a lot to learn about anatomy."


Rob Berendt
--
Group Dekko Services, LLC
Dept 01.073
PO Box 2000
Dock 108
6928N 400E
Kendallville, IN 46755
http://www.dekko.com

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