My consideration is many applications in IBMLink don't seem to merit the cost of true continuous operations. I think it is unreasonable to ask for 24/7/365(6), for all of IBMLink.
We need high availability for applications that enable us to effectively support our own high availability systems. This seems to be operational support for our System z hardware and software, reporting problems electronically, researching problem databases for known solutions and open APARs, and retrieving service. ResourceLink which we use for hardware support IBM moved to a higher availability infrastructure some time ago and has made process changes to make the infrequent outages less problematic for customers. SR on the current highly available infrastructure seems to be filling the need to submit problems electronically. I didn't like SR as much when I first saw it. The community at SHARE and customers directly gave IBM very critical feedback. IBM's leaders listened and delayed the replacement of ETR by SR until many significant issues had been addressed. There are remaining bugs and opportunities to improve i.e. the double sign-in requirement for some use cases. SR is any many ways better than ETR and I now prefer it i.e. attach small files, multiple users updates on status of PMR, etc. IBM is doing OK here. IBMLink SIS is critical to us. This weekend it was fortunate that IBMLink was up early as we had a planned infrastructure outage and ran into a problem that we found in five minutes using SIS probably would have taken hours using phone support at 0400 on a Sunday. IBMLink SIS or some other tool that is highly available and lets me search in one place all System z products solutions, problems, and information is important to us. IBMLink availability for SIS has not always met our expectations. This weekend for instance it was scheduled down while we had a major quarterly infrastructure upgrade. We hit a problem that caused our daily backups to fail after deploying RSU1203 (OA38632). We were lucky and IBMLink was up early from its scheduled down time so we were able to very quickly in a few minutes determine that a fixing PTF and a workaround was available. I think IBM needs to make moving the search function improving completeness, usability, and transition to a high! availability infrastructure a priority. ShopzSeries or an equivalent facility to order and retrieve service and hold data electronically is the third leg on the stool for production support. This is an area where IBM has not met expectations and outages have occurred on a recurring basis with little or no explanation. The applications in IBMLink outside that core are conveniences and should have good availability but probably don't have a valid business case to be highly available. IBM is not meeting my expectations in terms of announcing downtime with sufficient lead time, providing access to a help desk with current availability information, and minimizing outages. I think IBM has an opportunity to showcase its own technologies in its customer faced systems that it seems to be missing. Best Regards, Sam Knutson, GEICO System z Team Leader mailto:[email protected] (office) 301.986.3574 (cell) 301.996.1318 "Think big, act bold, start simple, grow fast..." -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Thomas Conley Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2012 9:28 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: IBMLink outages in 2012 For our purposes, an outage is an outage, scheduled or not. Our requirement to IBM is clearly 24/7/365(6), for all of IBMLink, SR, ShopZ, Internet Service Retrieval, etc. Ed's right in that IBM exacerbates the problem by having the outages during most z/OS installation's prime time for maintenance. They should move these outages to 0dark30 on Thursday morning or something. Regards, Tom Conley ==================== This email/fax message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution of this email/fax is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please destroy all paper and electronic copies of the original message. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
