You have essentially described IBM's business model. You pay more, but if something goes wrong someone shows up.
One day, the shared mount on a ton of systems around the company just stopped working. The master node (these have internal redundancy at the network, controller, shelf, and disk level) had failed over to the redundant node, which after time had so many disks fail without being replace that it went down hard. They had to work with NetApp support (at great expense) to get it back up, which took a few days. The system had been attempting to warn the admins as best it could of the impending doom for the better part of a year, and no one noticed.
The moral of this story is that you can have big-dollar redundant systems, but if you don't also have some dollars going to the care and feeding of them, it's wasted. The other lesson here is that such systems don't exist in isolation and are only as good as their weakest link, which in this case was a now-unreachable SMTP server. Lastly, although the LCD displays were trying their best to also signal this fault condition, people who would walk by these physical machines were used to this, so they didn't bother to actually read the errors. Do that at the peril of anything dependent on that system.
Agreed. Another moral: Don't believe anything works until you see it with your own eyes.
It would be interesting where I am since you skip local crime and go straight to federal offense. Kept me away from booze in high school since its not minor in possessions, its federal bootlegging. I can only imagine what trying to enter a server room nets a person.
This is the area were inverted Unix philosophy applies: Give me good news as well. A weekly mail, that backups (or the filer or RAID or whatever) works A-OK. If the mail stops coming, something broke.
By the time it was being looked after by the third party maintainer they'd just leave us a few disks and a couple of fibre channel controllers onsite and we'd get the DC remote hands to swap them out. The faulty parts were then boxed up and couriered back to the maintenance company all on their dime.
There was not an awful lot of involvement on our end except for authorising access to the DC when an engineer needed to attend.
None of this was massively expensive (and this was 24x7x365 cover) in the great scheme of things given their mission critical status.
Yes. They are expensive and deviously good at it. Or, at least they used to be many years ago.
Many years back I worked in a tiny town (1000 people?) four hours from the closest depot and we even got same day service. This cost a king's ransom. But the AS/400 ran most of the business...
I think the bigger IBM z machines do allow zero-time upgrades, but the iSeries (new name for AS/400) is basically a reboot the machine affair. I've never heard of Sysplex in regards to the iSeries.
They sent me two DVDs with 12 pages of instructions. The unnumbered first page is release notes and a notice that physical media deliveries would be an average of 5 to 9 business days on Jan 31, 2007 and beyond. (odd notice for a 2016 document)
Page 1 has my customer information with all sorts of tracking numbers. It also include the number of selected files (1,360), Kilo-bytes (sp) of data (3,963,529), fixes (3,394 fixes with 815 Kilo-bytes of data were superceded), etc.
Pre-install instructions finally show up on page 3 and the big warning about f'n it up shows on page 4. Page 6 brings us to the actual install which is written to be typed exactly with exact detailed results of each step.
to give an example
2. Load the image catalog into the virtual optical
device using the following command:
LODIMGCLG IMGCLG(ptfcatalog) DEV(OPTVRTxx) OPTION(*LOAD)
3. Type GO PTF and press the Enter key
4. Take menu option 8 and press Enter key