Re: Ownership won't agree to an upgrade

We did indeed recover it twice.  There were a few more trials and tribulations along the way where the company self inflicted critical wounds as well, but the bottom line is three things they learned:

1) Developers don't usually want to be system administrators, and when it's 20% of their job, the usually do it poorly (not withstanding some of the folks on this list)

2) Tapes get old and fail.  When you initialize a tape every time you use it you loose the performance stats on it, that's why there are expiration dates on the volume and files.  That data would have told them the tapes were going bad with write errors

3) replicated systems are cheap compared to explaining to the shareholders (public company in this case) why you lost several million dollars because you saved thousands......

--
Jim Oberholtzer
Agile Technology Architects

On 9/7/2017 9:24 AM, DrFranken wrote:

If I recall Jim, didn't we recover that machine TWICE? :-(

I had another customer who had a 3rd party maintenance guy do the same, but also have had IBM pull the wrong drive as well. Nobody is perfect!

In the worst case the customer had a RAID set with a dead drive but the CSR pulled one of the remaining good drives.... Well formerly good.. It's a long story (and featured in COMMON session: "Tales from the Data Center") but they were down from Thursday morning to Tuesday noon. Yes the problem was created by a human pulling the wrong drive. But along the way the problem was exacerbated by yet another drive failing during the recovery, a RAID card failing a battery that had only been replaced weeks before and a bad tape - yes they wear out too.  Additionally further human errors and bad decisions contributed to the long recovery.

Lesson is though: this is the sort of thing that happens as hardware ages and that SOB Murphy lines up the failures to happen when they matter most.


        - Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 9/7/2017 8:58 AM, Jim Oberholtzer wrote:

Bob,

How big of a machine is that (storage/memory/processor)?  If it will fit into a P8 4way box (I really bet it will depending on storage) you could be looking at a box for $800/mo WITH maintenance for 36 months.  One of the other posts pointed out that maintenance on a P5 or P6 is going to be more than that in the end.

Now Park Place and a couple of the other hardware maintenance outfits do an OK job with the hardware and do it cheaper than IBM; until the CE they send in replaces the wrong drive, then proceeds to pull the dead drive out (live without the proper actions) and stuff a new drive in it's place and call it done. Just to add to the anguish, he was an HP UNIX guy, so that's how you replace a drive, right?   Larry Bolhuis and I spent 6 days recovering from that one in northern Indiana a few years back. Cost the Director of IT her job.  Third party maintenance is cheap, not inexpensive.  I've got lots more like that one to make the point.

--
Jim Oberholtzer
Agile Technology Architects

On 9/7/2017 7:47 AM, Bob Cagle wrote:

From: PaulMmn
You're probably not current with upgrades to your 3rd-party applications either-- most have given up support for 7.1 by now.  Any accounting or payroll packages need annual updates for things like
W-2 forms (or is payroll out-sourced?)?

Payroll is outsourced.  We JD Edwards World and we are just one release behind.  Current version is A9.4 and we are on A9.3.1.

Thanks

Bob Cagle
IT Manager
Lynk