Edward Gould wrote:
On Oct 6, 2017, at 8:57 AM, John Eells <[email protected]> wrote:
Bob,
I am asking specifically about order turnaround time for ServerPac orders that
contain z/OS.
It's interesting to understand the RFN and RECEIVE ORDER expectations and needs
as well, but I am feeling lazy on this particular Friday, so I want to try to
boil only one part of the ocean at a time. ;-)
The problem everyone has with physical media is being able to ship something
compatible with what people have today, and will continue to have tomorrow.
Our tape drives cartridge formats are not, as far as I know, readable by other
manufacturer's tape drives these days. (3480 was the last interoperable
format.)
On the workstation front, optical drives are falling out of favor on new
machines. I personally want to stay away from USB memory sticks, and a number
of very security-conscious clients do not allow their use at all. They disable
USB ports entirely, which precludes all things that are USB-attached and not
just memory sticks. We're starting to run shy of things we can send everyone
that will remain usable for the foreseeable future.
It's this, really, that might drive us toward Internet-only delivery at some
future point.
John Eells
z/OS Platform Installation Strategy
John,
How are you going to handle the orders for Tapes? Our installation does not
have *ANY* internet connection from the M/F. AFAIK that will never change. The
place is hyper about security. I think its overblown, but the current upper
management says NFW. When they say no they mean no. Myself I am happy with
tape, I don’t have to worry about the SMPE creating datasets all over the place
and having 5 volumes(or more) for simple maintenance.
In addition to what I wrote above, we, like everyone else, are driven by
client behaviors and available technologies. So let's talk about
numbers for a minute.
As of this March, 86% of our orders are being downloaded, and every time
we get new numbers that percentage goes up. Of the remainder, the last
year I pulled numbers to break down DVD vs. tape, about 2/3 of orders
delivered on physical media were on DVD. That was a couple of years
ago. If I extrapolate the trend we saw then, that 1/3 of the remainder
is probably more like 1/6 today.
In other words, tape orders are dwindling, and not slowly.
At some point, we will almost certainly drop tape support for software
delivery. It seems very likely to me that we simply will not be able to
justify replacing the tape drives in the distribution centers once our
current tape drives reach end of life.
I hope nobody finds this surprising. We have, for example, discussed
this before in IBM-MAIN.
In a future without tape, if you do not have optical drives and cannot
connect to the Internet, you will need to take a laptop outside the
firewall, download your order, bring it back in, and upload it to your
z/OS system. This is already supported and documented, and has been for
well over a decade now.
--
John Eells
IBM Poughkeepsie
[email protected]
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