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> The only time ours went down was for upgrades, and the few times we ran out of UPS power during storms. I'm surprised that you didn't have UPS for stopgap un
by msandford 11y ago
> The only time ours went down was for upgrades, and the few times we ran out of UPS power during storms.
I'm surprised that you didn't have UPS for stopgap until the generators kick in. If you have a mainframe, it's probably for something mission critical to where a generator (or two or three for redundancy) is a good idea.
I'm curious what kind of business you're in where you can justify a mainframe and UPS but not generator, if you can talk about it.
- chiph 11y agoThis was many years ago - the firm wrote and sold accounting software for the AS/400, so while they were production machines, there wasn't really a 100% uptime requirement since there weren't end-users involved. The UPS was there to tide us over short power outages, and ensure a clean shutdown (IPLs after a hard shutdown took a very long time, as the OS would have to verify the whole filesystem). Me and another guy were the only Windows programmers there. We put a friendly UI in front of the AS/400 via network calls (SNA APPC, later TCP/IP sockets) to an endpoint that the RPG guys wrote for us. Later, we wrote an Excel add-in to allow the users to access their financial data from the AS/400, and this became so successful that the entire company is now based around the same technology. Sadly, I don't get a percentage.
- msandford 11y agoThanks for sharing! That makes a lot more sense.