RE: OS400 DATA MIGRATION

["Richard Jackson" <richardjackson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I see a $30,000 hardware expense.  What does the rest of the group think?

I agree with Larry that the tapes will probably be fine, so the "original
poster" CAN unload his system, reconfigure, and reload reliably without
additional expense (except for the cost of the new 8 gb disk drives).

I am a capacity and performance guy and I am "interested" in this track.  I
suspect that the existing disk IOP will be overloaded by running two RAID
sets - an 8-arm RAID set composed of 4gb drives and a 7-arm RAID set
composed of 8 gb drives.  I suspect that the second rack offers flexibility
that will be valuable to the "original poster".  If the company grows more
in the future, they will either have to add the second tower or replace the
whole system at that time.  It makes some sense to delay the new-tower
purchase until it is required and it also makes some sense to buy now and
get the benefits now.

Richard Jackson
mailto:richardjackson@richardjackson.net
http://www.richardjacksonltd.com
Voice: 1 (303) 808-8058
Fax:   1 (303) 663-4325

-|-----Original Message-----
-|From: owner-midrange-l@midrange.com
-|[mailto:owner-midrange-l@midrange.com]On Behalf Of Larry Bolhuis
-|Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2000 7:56 PM
-|To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
-|Subject: Re: OS400 DATA MIGRATION
-|
-|
-|Richard,
-|
-|> I was speaking of cheaper in the sense of lost time, risk of
-|lost data if
-|> the machine dies while running unprotected, risk of lost data
-|if one of the
-|> backup tapes decides to be unreadable - that kind of cheaper.
-|
-|  Indeed IF a) A disk fails during the upgrade, and b) BOTH copies of
-|his backup are bad, then he is in deep deep weeds indeed.
-|
-|> In my opinion, people sometimes spend too much time worrying
-|about hardware
-|> cost.  How much would the expansion unit cost and what feature/function
-|> would he get for it?  (that's a real question, not rhetorical)
-|
-|  As I recall-ball park-prices for a 50xx tower (Quote me NOT on these
-|numbers!!)  $13,000 a 5052 top hat $5500, a 6533 DASD controller $9,900.
-|May need a #2688(?) to drive the fiber to the expansion cabinet $2,500.
-|Add to that space, power, heat, and annual maintenance and it gets
-|pretty expensive for sure.
-|
-|  Certainly compared to the failure above (if it happens) it's cheap.
-|
-|  On the other hand if your tape drive writes two unusable copies of a
-|backup tape consecutively without throwing an error of some kind then
-|you likely have rust for backup for some time back.  While I recognize
-|that tape errors do exist I have done dozens and dozens of system
-|migrations with tape and cannot remember a single tape error stopping a
-|conversion. Conditions are optimal - the tapes never change temp or
-|humidity. The same drive that wrote them has to read them. The drive is
-|intentionally cleaned before each save. New or nearly new tapes are
-|prodently used. It don't get any better'n nat!
-|
-|  If the risk of missing data is evaluated -vs- the cost of the
-|expansion I suspect most risk managers will accept it.
-|
-|>  How much
-|> will a decent developer cost for the next year?  I would guess about
-|> $100,000 with desk, floor space, phone, PC, wages, overhead,
-|machine cycles
-|> to support him, parking spot, and so forth.  How much will it cost to
-|> rebuild the world if the backup turns out to be unreadable?
-|How much will
-|> it cost in hours for the OP to fix if that happens?  How much
-|will it cost
-|> the business in lost opportunity while their people cannot use
-|the system?
-|
-|  I have been involved with system recovery when a drive failed and
-|backups were junk. (In this case flat were not done and nobody was told.
-|THe tape was labeled, logged, and in the vault but was empty!)  We had
-|to restore the OS and major componants from 5 YEAR old tapes! (no errors
-|but there were more than a few things missing).  Their nightly backups
-|had not been updated for new products or program libraries in the 5
-|years  I never saw the estimated cost to the business but it was 6
-|figures by the end of day 1 for sure. Major function restoral took three
-|days, complete restoral took over a week.
-|
-|  This mess had NOTHING to do with tape failure, rather it was
-|Operational Error.
-|
-|  Again, my .02.
-|
-|   - Larry
-|
-|--
-|Larry Bolhuis
-|Arbor Solutions, Inc.
-|(616) 451-2500
-|(616) 451-2571 -fax
-|lbolhuis@arbsol.com
-|+---
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