Re: iSeries DASD - Note From Buell

[Chuck Lewis <clewis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

INTERESTING Justin, thanks !

So are all customers getting this or was it just to BP's, etc. ?

Chuck

"Haase, Justin C." wrote:

> 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
> +---
> | This is the Midrange System Mailing List!
> | To submit a new message, send your mail to MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com.
> | To subscribe to this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-SUB@midrange.com.
> | To unsubscribe from this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-UNSUB@midrange.com.
> | Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com
> +---

+---
| This is the Midrange System Mailing List!
| To submit a new message, send your mail to MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com.
| To subscribe to this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-SUB@midrange.com.
| To unsubscribe from this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-UNSUB@midrange.com.
| Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com
+---