I think a predominant number of us are based outside of your country and I
think IBM does have some regional policies so our experiences may differ.
Personally I feel that you are way too far behind. From what I remember I
think you are at V5R3.
There's a few different mindsets. I think a significant number of people
like to keep their systems under maintenance, both hardware and software.
And this may include any vendor purchased software such as ERP packages,
etc. This allows you to get fixes, support, upgrades, etc.
Some people may keep their hardware and OS under maintenance but drop
vendor package support. Their belief may be that they've so customized it
that it would be impossible to ever upgrade. However some packages will
refuse to even sell you a brand new version of their software at current
list price unless you catch up on back maintenance. The problem with that
is if you get a new box or version of the OS the vendor package may
require a new software key and will not work. Some people have been hit
with charges well into the 6 figures. Expect some bitter responses from
people who have shot their foot off to save some money.
Then there are others who view their system as a one time purchase they do
every 15 years or greater. They never put on any upgrades or PTFs with
the mindset "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". They cross their fingers
that they'll never have to maintain the hardware, or if so, they'll may
IBM under a "time and materials" contract. They may figure that $300/hr
or so may be cheaper than paying hardware maintenance for years and not
using it. Then again, I bet IBM doesn't even keep your disk drives
currently in stock so ebay may be your only hardware supplier.
I do not know if IBM has some simple websites which will tell you some
sort of rough figure for a low end system with a few basic options (like
application development tools, compilers, Query and/or SQL, etc).
You could try going to
http://www.ibm.com/systems/power/software/i/solutions.html
and try the chat feature which will eventually pop up.
There are some concepts which will seem like a rather large leap for you.
For example, the smallest disk drive on a current system may be larger
than your current entire system. And you will be best served to get
multiple disk drives in order to spread out disk arms. How many is a
debate in itself. Some may figure that even a 1 or 2 drive system may be
faster than the old model you have. Some follow rules of thumb they came
up with 20 years ago and see no reason to change and say everyone needs a
ship load of arms.
I upgraded a 42 arm system to a 7 arm system and got much better
performance. But that was do to the new drive speed, disk controllers and
a host of other things. So I've seen some of this in reality.
Rob Berendt
midrange.com
