RE: Joe's V5R1 upgrade

> From: Mark Phippard

(snipping a LOT of excellent points - please go back and read Mark's post if
you missed it)

> The iSeries rocks when it comes
> to unscheduled downtime, but it is not so great in the area of planned
> downtime.

This is one of those times when I can only agree and shake my head, because
I have no good answer.  While not quite as bleak to me as a developer, I
still agree that the PTF process is slowly declining.  Whether this
correlates to the comparative explosion of functionality we've seen over the
last 5 to 10 years, or is simply an artifact of internal processes at IBM
(or as is likely, a bit of both), the final outcome is that it is indeed
more difficult to keep an iSeries up for that magical 99.99% uptime.  Heck,
depending no your environment, you might be hard pressed these days to keep
the machine up 99% of the time (88 hours scheduled downtime per year).

On the other hand, though, applying the latest group PTF on V5R1 (which
including HIPERs, database, WebSphere, HTTP) required no intermediate IPLs,
so maybe there's hope yet.

Joe