Re: Staying current - Was: Skipping lots of releases

[DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Scott:

Well said.

I have seen many customers leave i because 'That thing is SOOOO hard to 
maintain' yet they hadn't done so much as a PTF or a full system save in 
more than 5 years and only IPLed when the power went out.  One wonders 
how bad a windows server would be after running a production app with no 
updates or backups for 5 years.

It's like the man with the Oil Filter from 20 years ago: "You can pay me 
(a little) now or pay me (a lot) later"

    - Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

On 1/25/2011 10:35 AM, Ingvaldson, Scott wrote:
> 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you hear a horror story about some esoteric problem that took 36 hours to solve it usually involves some combination of out of date software/hardware/PTFs.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