Hear hear! Despite running more systems on more powerful hardware than when I started here in the mid 90s, we now support the entire mainframe infrastructure more effectively with fewer people. As John points out, software is of higher quality and more easily installed, debugged, and maintained than ever before.
Another huge advance was array DASD. Until relief arrived, I hadn't realized how much time and grief we had squandered over the years on recovering from SLED failures. It's all better. . . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 626-302-7535 Office 323-715-0595 Mobile [email protected] From: John Eells <[email protected]> To: [email protected], Date: 06/02/2014 07:50 AM Subject: Re: Costs of core Sent by: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote: <snip> > However, MVS system > tended to require 10-30 people for care&feeding ... which scaled poorly > to hundreds of distributed departmental computers (IPL and run with > little or no human intervention). It's certainly true that running the first large MVS system required a significant number of people (operators, production control, system programmers, etc.). However, the second through *n*th had far lesser incremental cost. I was a sysprog during this period and we supported 30-34 MVS systems (depending on the year) plus several VM systems with perhaps 3 people per MVS system overall. I know of at least one customer who ran a one-person system programming shop at the time, too. Also, because a substantial fraction of system programmer time was devoted to debugging at the time, I rather suspect the average ratio (whatever that might be) has improved markedly. -- John Eells ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
