iSeries DASD - Note From Buell

["Haase, Justin C." <Justin.Haase@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thought you all would find this interesting.

<snip>
Recently, there have been some industry press articles about iSeries DASD
reliability and quality problems.  As you know, we are taking significant
actions to address these issues that have affected a very small percentage
of our customers.

While the vast majority of the iSeries 8 and 18 GB disk drives are not
experiencing problems, some customers are seeing failures at a higher rate
than is acceptable.  We have been working with these customers to ensure
they are taking the appropriate steps to limit their exposure to any data
loss failures, and in the meantime we have been vigorously attacking the
problem as a joint effort of our system and disk drive development labs.

We have made measurable improvements to the 8 and 18 GB 10Krpm disk drives
through a series of incremental changes to the system, the drives, and the
manufacturing and shipping processes.  All aspects of the issue have been
under examination, and changes have been implemented to address supplier
contamination problems, resolve drive resonance issues, tighten tolerances
with new drive components, and fix drive microcode via PTFs.  We've also
delivered system PTFs to resolve SCSI bus contention issues and further
reduce the likelihood of multiple drive failures in RAID arrays.  We've
made significant improvements in the quality of the drives that we're
shipping today, and we are actively working to qualify additional drive
models to use in the few situations where the before mentioned actions
don't satisfactorily provide a solution to the customer.  We encourage any
customer that is not satisfied with their drive performance to work with
their service and sales teams to ensure that the appropriate actions are
taken.

The iSeries system has a strong reputation for being one of the most
reliable systems in the industry.  Its architecture, the integration, and
the capabilities it provides for data protection result in a very robust
system which our customers rely on heavily.  IBM understands that, and you
can be sure that when a reliability issue hits any of our customers, we are
relentless at getting it addressed.


Buell

Buell Duncan, General Manager, Mid-Market Servers, Server Group
Rt. 100 , OB4/2N5
Somers, NY 10589
914-766-4400 or 8-826-4400 -- FAX:  8-926-4878
Internet:  bgduncan@us.ibm.com
</snip>

Justin C. Haase
Midrange Systems Engineer - Kingland Systems Corporation
IBM Certified AS/400 Systems Administrator
phone - 641.355.1035
e-mail - justin.haase@kingland.com
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