Staying current - Was: Skipping lots of releases

Forgive me, but I have to take a moment here to stress that I believe that all of us owe our employers and clients the responsibility of properly explaining the advantages of maintaining supported O/S releases, hardware and reasonably current PTF groups.

I understand that it is not always possible and in some rare cases possibly not prudent but in general it seems like most times you hear a horror story about some esoteric problem that took 36 hours to solve it usually involves some combination of out of date software/hardware/PTFs.

The surest way to talk your employer into choosing to move onto another platform is to "prove" to them that the IBM i is too hard to upgrade, or unstable, or just too old or slow to run "modern" business applications. If your company is running V4R5 on a 720 that was purchased sometime in the previous century this is probably exactly what they see, regardless of the day to day performance.

If you stay reasonably current on your O/S and PTFs nearly every problem you do encounter will be fixed easier and more quickly. Instead of a hardware upgrade requiring six months of planning and downtime for two years worth of PTFs, an O/S upgrade, system migration and another O/S upgrade, it could be reduced to just a few hours work (and much lower risk) for a much simpler unload/reload. Regular maintenance is just as important on your enterprise server as it is on your car. As the mechanic says: You can pay me now, or pay me later...

Or as Larry pointed out yesterday "Often the 'fun part' is obtaining compatible save/restore media!" Are you being honest with yourself if you say that you don't have time for downtime but you back up your data on a tape drive that isn't even compatible with current hardware?

My 2¢


Regards,
 
Scott Ingvaldson
Senior IBM Support Specialist