Greetings, Robert. I'm glad people on your planet are able to spend all their time on maintenance. I posted this several years ago on another listserve, but it seems apropos here.
<rant> I do not feel that my DB2 for z/OS v.7 subsystems running at PUT 0404 are "behind" on maintenance. Although I do try to periodically apply hipers between maintenance cycles, I think being one year "behind" is quite reasonable, given the complexity of applying, testing, and rolling out maintenance to multiple operating systems and subsystems. IBM's attitude is that you should apply every RSU as soon as it comes out, and devote your entire staff to testing it and roll it out to all production systems within a week, so you'd never be more than 6 months behind on maintenance (since, by definition, the RSU is at least 3 months "behind"). That's fine for them, but when people on this list start thinking that has any resemblance to reality, I feel the need to inject some experiential data. I have come to expect IBM to ask me why I haven't put on PTF's they haven't finished writing yet, but I'd like to inform everyone else here that it just doesn't work that way. In the real world, stability is more desirable than the latest bells and whistles, so many companies intentionally implement change control processes that slow the rate of change. Guess what? It works. When a maintenance package is carefully scrutinized by several departments, then the quality of the change improves. Because the change control process is lengthy, we do mass maintenance much less frequently -- about once a year here. When I have a problem, I expect IBM to give me a fix for my problem, not everyone else's. Sure, I could fix my problem by applying everything out there, but I can also fix it by applying a single PTF. And that happens two or three times a year. So instead of cranking away for months trying to do frequent maintenance, I get the _same_ result by doing the maintenance once and then a PTF here and there, which leaves me time to install, maintain, and support the other 26 products I'm responsible for. </rant> Regards, Cathy -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Robert Justice Sent: Wednesday, July 27, 2005 3:53 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: SMP sloppiness well, for one, if company x is a year+ behind on maintenance as you indicate below, hmmm, well, that's the company's own stupidity and no one but theirs. . It is prudent to stay a couple of months behind. 3 or so is normally considered "about right". IBM has their CST report, their parallel sysplex test report, etc. describing their environment, maintenance level, etc. Oh sure, they don't have all of the software packages "we" might, but there is still no reason on this planet to ever be a year+ behind (or more) on maintenance. That's absurd, you're just asking for trouble. We stay reasonably current and that includes the time to roll it across our multiple sysplexes and multiple lpars. There is absolutely no valid excuse for not staying reasonably current on maintenance, operating systems and hardware. Amazingly, by staying somewhat current, (but not quite bleeding edge) I can't say I've ever really run into any of these issues that are in this thread. OW50900 made life interesting for a brief period, but that's about it. I started with MVS/ESA V3 and now at "present" day at z/OS 1.6 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This email is confidential and may be legally privileged. It is intended solely for the addressee. Access to this email by anyone else, unless expressly approved by the sender or an authorized addressee, is unauthorized. If you are not the intended recipient, any disclosure, copying, distribution or any action omitted or taken in reliance on it, is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you believe that you have received this email in error, please contact the sender, delete this e-mail and destroy all copies. ============================================================================== ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
