And don't forget hardware maintenance!! When you skip that and you call
IBM for service their commitment is two fold: 8x5 (Meaning 8 to 5 on
Monday through Friday) and second: 1 business day response. This means
that in the worst case of a 5:05 PM Friday failure 1 Business day
becomes TUESDAY! This is because that 5:05 PM Friday report comes in on
Monday morning . Then because you don't have a contract you'll need to
work through entitlement first and issue a P.O. to IBM for the potential
worst case repair cost. [You will be charged actual but must issue the
P.O. for worst case.]
Sure you may be able to fix a lot of the likely things that fail on your
own. Chief among those are drives, cache batteries, RAID cards and Power
Supplies. But you still need time, parts, and troubleshooting skills.
Other things such as Planar board or processor could be much more
difficult to replace on your own.
As Pete said, the cost to your building when you are down will almost
certainly dwarf annual maintenance costs very quickly. Bottom line here
is you really need the full package of support! Hardware, Software, and
now with Power8 Firmware as well.
- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis
www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.
On 5/22/2016 10:04 AM, Pete Massiello - ML wrote:
Both Larry and Jim are correct. If you don't have SWMA you aren't
> entitled to PTFs. While we have all our images on our own tapes
> for every release, we won't put PTFs on a customer who doesn't
> have a valid SWMA Contract. It's not right, it's not fair to
> IBM, it's not fair to customers who paid for SWMA. Try doing
> a SNDPTFORD *HIPER from a command line on that machine, and
> you will see that.
My question to a business is if you are on a "Supported" release, and
> you are running your business on this machine, then why would you not
> have support? For the small amount of SWMA, it costs probably less
> than if the business was down a few hours a year.
Also remember, that if you are on Power8 you now have a SWMA like
> maintenance on the firmware and when you do a DSPFMWSTS you will
> see the date (Firmware Entitlement Date) that you will no longer
> be able to put fixes into your firmware, unless you renew your
> maintenance. Since you get 3 years with every P8, expect this
> to start hitting in about 15 to 18 months. I wrote an article
> on this for IT Jungle:
>
http://www.itjungle.com/fhg/fhg100615-printer01.html
Pete
Pete Massiello
iTech Solutions
http://www.itechsol.com
http://www.iInTheCloud.com
Office: 203-744-7854
midrange.com
