RE: 6618 drives for model 270

Joe,

At a prior place of employment, we chose to use BCC drives in our new 270.

IIRC, they were the 15K ones in addition to being configured for 1/2 capacity (FAST as BCC calls it).

I forget now how many we had, 8 or 10 maybe? We did have the 270 sidecar attached.

Had one fail over the years, but other than that no issues. The box is still running v5r2 right now.
However, the BCC drives have were replaced this year by IBM drives simply because BCC wasn't
particularly responsive when they looked to add drives.

Not to take anything away from Larry with respect to the power requirements. But the reason we went
with BCC is that we only needed 10 BCC disks to get the performance that would have required 19(?) IBM
disks. I'm not an Electrical Engineer ;-) But it seems to me that 1/2 the disks at twice the power
isn't all that bad. Larry, you've got more experience, any comments?

Charles

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Joe Pluta
Sent: Monday, August 13, 2007 11:13 AM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: RE: 6618 drives for model 270

Well this just sucks.

The primary reason I want to go with the BCC drives is that
they are 15K drives rather than the 10K IBM drives. This
machine tops out at V5R4; I wonder if I should just apply
V5R4 and the latest cumes and then never apply another PTF.

Speaking of PTFs, isn't that what A and B sides are for?
Isn't there a procedure to apply a PTF and if it smokes, to
go back to the pre-PTF state?

Joe

From: Larry Bolhuis

We had this exact thing happen to customers using BCC

drives. Install

PTF *poof* drive goes away and it was in a 270. Luckily

they had just

one so RAID kept them alive until a replacement from BCC

arrived that

was compatible with the PTF. (The drive had to be purchased

by the way

it was not sent as a replacement for a failed drive.) As I

understand

it, the PTF required some particular operation that the older BCC
drive didn't support, when the drive wouldn't answer it got

voted off

the island.

IBM Would never do that to their own drives because they know what
they can and cannot do.

A classic case was back in the old emulator board days of the S/36.
One of the third party board makers was touting that IBMs

board had a

chip on it that added cost and provided no function. The competitor
could sell cheaper because the chip was not there. They even had
pictures with the IBM chip circled as the reason why IBM was more
expensive. Then the AS/400 was introduced and the chip was

required or you couldn't connect.

The advertisements (and as I recall the competitor) went

away quickly.

This also happened to Decision Data workstations more than

once with

OS upgrades wiping them out until new PROMs were installed.

IBM frequently has unused stuff in their hardware that doesn't get
used until deemed necessary. Since the 3rd party guys have

to reverse

engineer the data stream they don't see the unused

capabilities. When

IBM makes use of these functions the third party guys

sometimes aren't

ready.

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