Re: HMC Help

I too concur. We have dual HMC's. However, to do any sort of work other
than a duck in the machine room and out we use a "shared console" session
on a PC. In fact, we have a PC in our machine room just for this purpose.
I can also share the console from my desktop, home, etc. Works for full
system down kind of stuff, like dedicated system saves, RCLSTG, etc.

If you do that it's quite easy to do your macro's from that PC.

Is there really that much that you need an operator working on the system
console so much? Remember, when they work on the console itself they run
at priority 10 versus the users default of priority 20.

However, I can understand the financial concerns of why have two machines
when the HMC can do the consoles. But, is there an operator nowadays who
doesn't need a PC anyway for email and other functions?

We haven't had an operator in our machine room in about 2 decades. And we
run 3 boxes with a total of 12 lpars (not counting blade centers and
whatnot). Then again, we don't even have a printer in our machine room.
(Two reasons, dust, and we've reduced and decentralized printing.)

We're thinking of going more radical. Instead of dealing with the 2 hours
a day unloading tapes, readying them for Iron Mountain, reloading tapes,
etc we are going to be using offsite tape. We won't see a physical tape
except (and this is just a maybe) for the every other month full system
save.

Rob Berendt