Re: IBM Maintenance alternatives

[rob@xxxxxxxxx]

Years back (S/36 days) we used to use Sorbus maintenance and Decision Data 
maintenance.  They were "ok" but we're happier with IBM maintenance.  What 
gets me is that the outside maintainers base their prices on x% of IBM 
prices.  Even when IBM artificially jacks up their prices on older 
equipment to make purchasing the newer equipment look more attractive.  I 
can see why people like James do their own maintenance on their antiquated 
hardware when you probably can buy 2 of their current boxes on Ebay for 
the cost of one month of maintenance.  Back when we used twinax printers 
and the maintenance started getting so dang expensive, we started buying 
used ones and warehousing them.

We also have the philosophy that if we are paying through the nose for 
software/hardware maintenance we call IBM at the drop of a hat.  Never a 
week goes by that I don't open a couple of pmr's.  Recently I worked a 
week where I only came in for 1/2 day and still opened 2 pmr's.

Rob Berendt
-- 
Group Dekko Services, LLC
Dept 01.073
PO Box 2000
Dock 108
6928N 400E
Kendallville, IN 46755
http://www.dekko.com





"Jim Franz" <franz400@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 
Sent by: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
01/06/2005 08:57 AM
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Re: IBM Maintenance alternatives






For my whole career (which is the life of all the sys 3x & 400 products),
I have yet to see a savings on non ibm maint that was worth the additional
downtime to my customers (and many tried, but all came back to ibm after
some incident). Just like another thread on the Comair outage, will you
make some decisions (perhaps saving a few bucks) that can affect your
company's ability to function? The biggest excuse I heard from non ibm 
techs
was their inability to get parts rapidly, and their use of untested "doa"
used parts.
jim

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James H H Lampert" <jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 7:00 PM
Subject: Re: IBM Maintenance alternatives


> > James:
> > Other than auxiliary storage, you've never had any other hardware
> > failures (memory, processor cards, tape drives, etc.)?
>
> I've had to change out at least one tape drive, and at least one CD-ROM
> drive, and I've had to pull and re-seat a few cards, from time to time,
> but no, we've never had anything we couldn't fix ourselves.
>
> We have, however, retired two terminals. Our 3180 somehow developed an
> overload bad enough to instantly blow replacement fuses (to be fair,
> though, I once owned a CGA monitor so badly shorted out, the fuses
> EXPLODED!) And our 3487HC eventually went "pop" and gave up the ghost 
(we
> now have a 3488 or 3489 [I can't recall which it is], a 3477FA, and a
> twinax Yestation).
>
> --
> JHHL
>
>
> -- 
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