Re: DASD upgrade - an endless problem

[Larry Bolhuis <lbolhuis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> I attended an IBM Rochester factory tour about a year ago.  The guide
> pointed to an AS/400 system running some aspect of the manufacturing
> process.  It had a couple terabytes of storage strung out in 25 or so feet
> of storage expansion units.  You'd think that after walking around and past
> the system for a few months one of the engineers might have said, "The
> customers have got to HATE this..."

   They certainly were not using the current iSeries disk towers then
because you can get 1.37G of RAID protected disk in a single tower today
and have been able to since the 17G drives were announced. And this
number is certain to climb. So in less than four feet of space they
could have 2.7G.  SAN or not that's a lot of storage in not very much
space. 

   Given the maintainability of iSeries disks I'm just not sure where
SANs makes sense for iSeries customers. Much of what they offer to other
platforms already exists in OS/400 and it's all in one place.  With the
coming upgrades to V5R1 and ops nav it gets even better.

  - Larry

ps-- and I am aware of one customer attempting to connect their brand
new 820's to an EMC box and are having fits making it work. Power
issues, crazy bus and cabinet setups required to load and drive all the
6501s they need (which interestingly are back ordered over 1 Month at
IBM right now....) Lies told by EMC about how they could back up the
iSeries from the SAN box (remember SAVSTG?)  Just doesn't make sense to
me......


-- 
Larry Bolhuis           | Cogito ergo mercari iSeries 
Arbor Solutions, Inc.   |
(616) 451-2500          |               (I think, therefore I buy iSeries.)
(616) 451-2571 -fax     |
lbolhuis@arbsol.com     |        #3  1951-2001
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