RE: V5R2 Quality - Notes from the field

Jim -

I agree with everything you say, but O/V was just an example.  

My point is that we have been told from the beginning that the O/S 400
implementation of LPAR would support +/- 1 release from the primary in
secondary LPARs.  While that may be technically true of the software, the
only hardware currently capable of +/- 1 release support is an n-way 7xx or
8xx with an I-Star processor, and those only support full processor LPARs.
We are on the third generation of LPAR processors, working on the fourth.
Yet no hardware has ever supported -1 release in a partition at its GA.

You can't drive sales of new hardware if it doesn't solve existing problems.

Scott Ingvaldson
AS/400 System Administrator
GuideOne Insurance Group 

-----Original Message-----
Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 17:29:47 -0500
From: Jim Damato <jdamato@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: V5R2 Quality - Notes from the field needed

>Scott Ingvaldson
>As big of an AS/400 fan as I am, just last 
>Friday I heard of a compatability problem 
>that I could not believe... It also means 
>that if you have a business need to keep 
>OV400 around a while longer (thankfully I 
>don't have this problem anymore) you CANNOT
>migrate to new hardware

Try not to think of it as a compatibility problem.  Think of it as a problem
with discontinued software.  If a third party software company decommissions
a product or a version of a product you're basically stuck at the last OS
version on which they've certified the product.  It's been quite a while
since IBM announced the end of OV400.  Users have had a lot of time to
decide whether to keep legacy systems alive at their own risk or move on.

I've known of folks who kept VAXes around because their obsolete software
package would not port to an Alpha, companies running unsupported versions
of Sybase because their applications software company went out of business,
and industry segments dedicated to keeping old System/38's alive because
they did not want to migrate legacy software.  We had to keep an arsenal of
specific models of Compaq 486's around because our legacy polling product
would not run on Pentiums.

Our HP Superdome only runs HP/UX release 11.11.  You could not upgrade your
V-Class server to a Superdome if your third party app was certified at 10.x
or 11.0.  It's not unthinkable that IBM would release new hardware that only
runs the latest version of OS/400.  It's also not unbelievable that OS/400
will not continue to be backwards compatible to a desupported OV400 product.

-Jim