On 7/28/2013 3:11 AM, George Henke wrote:
We have learned that the Visara FICON product has only 5 customers and has
been available for only since Jan 1.
This looks and feels more like beta testing, the bleeding edge, than
implementation of a real product,
The omission of ESCON from the zEC12 is proving to be a fatal mistake. It
is forcing us to use these kind of unvetted products.
Visara's FICON-based solution first appeared in January 2013. That's
only four months after IBM confirmed publicly, via their August 2012
zEC12 announcement, that the new machines would not offer ESCON. ISVs,
business partners and others saw zEC12 previews a couple of months
before the official August 2012 announcement. So, best-case for Visara
is 4-6 months lead-time.
I'm certainly no hardware expert, but 4-6 months seems like a very short
amount of time. I'm not surprised to learn that "bugs" in the firmware
are still being ironed out.
These kind of HW oversights are reminiscent of the days when IBM
prematurely converted from powerful Bi-Polar chips to underpowdered CMOS
chips and customers had to flee back to the Bi-Polar boxes.
When will IBM learn.
It's been three years since the IBM's July 2010 SOD first warned that
z196/z114 would be the last generation to offer ESCON channels.
Sometimes IBM reverses SODs (IMBED/REPLICATE is a good example), so I
can't really blame Visara for not gearing up to develop a FICON-only
solution based solely on an IBM SOD. They had to wait for "official"
confirmation.
I'm really not sure what IBM should have done differently in this case,
but I imagine there will be no shortage of opinions on this list... ;)
--
Edward E Jaffe
Phoenix Software International, Inc
831 Parkview Drive North
El Segundo, CA 90245
http://www.phoenixsoftware.com/
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