Re: Help required to stop this company replacing their iSeries

Steve:

I have been with my current employer, a contract manufacturer of 
electronics, for over 11 years. In that time, we have had exactly two 
unplanned outages, total, for four different AS/400 boxes.

In the first case, an outside cleaning service that shouldn't have been in 
the Computer Room anyway plugged a space heater "back" into the UPS 
protecting the system.... When the heater was unplugged and the UPS reset, 
the AS/400 came back up with no data lost. (The cleaning service was also 
reset.)

The second case involved a failed power supply. Downtime was less than 
four hours. Simple calculations say the field service rep for IBM averaged 
over 75 miles per hour (over 120 kilometers per hour) through workday 
Chicago area traffic to bring us a replacement part. No data was lost.

There have been other outages, but all involved the public electric grid 
failing. All power loss events were "soft landings." No outage of any kind 
has affected data to the point of requiring a restore from backup.

On three occasions, IBM has called us to schedule replacement for a 
failing hard disk drive when we had not even noticed that anything was 
wrong.

We are not an all-IBM shop. We have crucial applications in Windows 
Server, Unix, and Linux operating systems running on brand-name server 
hardware. They just can't compete with the AS/400 for "out of sight, out 
of mind" reliability.

Darrell

Darrell A. Martin  -  754-2187
Manager, Computer Operations
dmartin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx



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