Re: Staying current on releases? (was: Are there any System i sites on the Internet that offer accounts?)

How true Tom. YEARS ago we had a division running on a 5364. That was a
desktop S/36 that had to have a PC-AT directly attached with a special
cable as the console and shared processor (or some such thing). Well, the
disk died and some idiot dropped maintenance on it. We hooked them up
remotely to one of our central machines as a stop gap measure, and
restored their data. They loved it. Their controller was one of those
guys who'd steal the pennies out of a dead man's eyes but he had no
problem forking the money over. Keep in mind, our communication
infrastructure was no where near what it is today.

Another division was complaining about speed. We had one of those old
"server" models (white box) we were just getting ready to install for
programming. We let them borrow it. They loved it. Even though they did
a lot of interactive (BPCS) their batch ran so much faster their
interactive seemed like greased lightning. We ended up having to sell
them the box because they wouldn't give it back and didn't want the
disruption of doing another upgrade.

When we centralized we decided to always keep a beefy model. 40% of CPU
being utilized - get an upgrade. I am literally stuffing 7 more drives in
there this week. It's only 51% used of 5TB and already has 83 disk arms.
Power 6 processor is waiting on the loading dock. When we brought
divisions to the central machine they actually ran faster than having
their own machine local.

Rob Berendt