RE: Running overseas operations on AS400 in the US

We are running an older release of BPCS with sites across the US, in England, 
Germany, Singapore and Australia all using
the same database. The main problem that we ran into was system availability.  

We were having to take the system for about 5 hours for batch processing 
including daily backups. There was also a
weekly file reorg on Sunday night that took about 5 hours. We took the 5 hour 
batch processing window from about 9pm mst
(our main site) until about 2am mst.  This was taking the system away from 
Germany for all of their morning, and away
from Singapore for all of their afternoon.  

We were told to reduce the time that the system was unavailable down to one 
hour.  We took the process in steps.  Our
first step was to use a file mirroring utility that allows us to back up our 
system while the production system is still
active.  That bought us about 3 hours.  Our second step was to re-engineer the 
batch processing.   We made sure that any
processes still in the batch processing window still belonged there.  Then, we 
tweaked the invoice job, allowing it to
run while the system was available.  That took it out of the batch processing 
window.

Those actions brought our average batch window to under an hour.  The system is 
available at 6am for Germany, and for
Singapore, we usually take the system at around 12:15 and give it back by about 
1:15.  





date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 16:49:57 EST
from: DHolv@aol.com
subject: Running overseas operations on AS400 in the US

All:

I would appreciate hearing about any experiences with running BPCS in the Far 
East on an AS400 located in the US.  We would be running 4.05CD.  Looking for 
communications issues, response time, help desk, etc. - any issues, 
recommendations (or experiences good or bad) you may have had.

Regards,

Dan Holverson

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