RE: Force fed LPAR -- MIDRANGE-L

Rob,

My two cents is that the LPAR decision comes down to availability and
dollars.  If it costs less money to provide the same services on a
partitioned machine, then it is worth considering.  I don't see the
downtime increase as 'drastic'.  Yes, you would not have your
application partition available when you upgraded your primary.  That's
it.  You might need to get out of the habit of regular cumulative PTF
application on your primary partition.  I see no reason why you could
not simultaneously upgrade your non-primary partitions.

The hardware is fairly easy to calculate.  A machine with two
application partitions gets compared against two separate machines.
Would there really be more cards and disks?  You would need to stock the
primary partition, everything else should be equal or less.

In your case of the four-partitioned box, IBM would be able to charge
for one additional upgrade - the non-application primary.

Your inability to run the latest and greatest Lotus workgroup
applications is a special case.  Something that used to run on a single
hardware platform now requires two machines if you upgrade.  For an IBM
representative to propose LPAR as anything other than an expensive
stopgap is insulting.  They should apologize and you should get on with
the fact that you either need two machines (partitions or boxes) or you
need to postpone your Domino upgrade.  That hurts, they've let you down.

I'm not sure on the complexity thing.  Certainly doing the hardware
planning for a partitioned machine (something I used to do) requires a
higher level of technical expertise than many shops possess.  I've
always felt that this work should be done by the vendor and funded out
of their margin, but not all vendors may do this work adequately.  I
would be scared about the initial configuration, but after that I don't
see significant increased complexity.

IBM will always push their advanced features and I think you've got the
skills to decide what's good for you.  I always worry about the small
shops.  I have trouble counting the number of installations I've run
into with model 500's which use an FSIOP (or whatever they were called
then) as a network card.  It was the latest and greatest at the time,
IBM pushed it, but the customers never implemented anything beyond a
network connection.

Best Regards,
Andy Nolen-Parkhouse

> On Behalf Of rob@dekko.com
> Subject: Force fed LPAR
>
> This is a multipart message in MIME format.
> --
> [ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
> IBM is really pushing LPAR.  Probably for a number of reasons.
> A)  It sells disk and more cards.
> B)  It increases complexity of your operation, thus perhaps selling
> services.
> C)  It drastically increases the amount of your downtime.  Perhaps
selling
> High Availability solutions, which may help sell services.  For
instance,
> if I run 4 partitions on V5R2 and I want to go to the next release,
won't
> I have to do 4 upgrades?  IBM charges $3,500 a upgrade therefore
wouldn't
> they get 4 times what they would have gotten out of a single partition
> machine?  Granted, we do our own upgrades, but I don't think you can
> upgrade all partitions at once.
>
> We've recently consolidated multiple machines onto one.  IBM's
insistence
> that we use LPAR to 'reduce cost' of some of their products.  Their
> insistence that we run LPAR if we want to currently run the latest and
> greatest Domino, Sametime and Quickplace on one iSeries.  And other
> attempts to ram LPAR down our throats is upsetting.
>
> Rob Berendt