RE: Disk Drives

I have to agree with Pat.  I've never had a WinTel machine (under
maintenance agreement or not) call for service and order it's own repair.
This has happened a few times on both our as400's (including our e911 Public
Service iSeries).  With RAIDed drives IBM as called before and told me a
drive was down before my operator did.


I have yet to have a WinTel machine tell me in advance (under maintenance
agreement or not) that the drive was getting ready to fail and that I better
replace it.  This had happened before we were RAIDed, and cost us 0% down
time for restore or lost work, because the drive was replaced before it
failed. At $3000 to $6000 of lost work per hour of down time for a reload
(not even considering non replaceable work) this fact saves us $30,000 to
$60,000+ every time we don't have to restore a system.

Plus I have found that if you have a RAID set on a WinTel platform that in
3-5 years if you lose a drive you can't even find them (unless you keep a
spare), so in most cases you have to change all you drives anyway every few
years.  I have 2GB drives in my AS/400 that I don't even question that IBM
will have replacements for if I lose one.

I would like for IBM to be closer in price to pc drives, but not at the cost
of keeping a system running.  The way I look at it is.

The cost of a PC drive ($200).
The cost of an iSeries drive ($2000).
The piece of mind and downtime savings an iSeries drive brings. (Priceless).

This may be the one area that it is still true "No one ever lost their job
buying IBM".

David Boling
Rowan County Information Systems