<snip> HP managers are reaping the harvest of their deep cost-cutting at EDS, in the form of a massive mainframe failure that crippled some very large clients, including the taxpayer-owned bank RBS.
An IBM Z10 at EDS's Stockley Park site, west of London, fell over this week after vital microcode fixes had not been applied, because all the qualified staff had been fired. Previously the updates would have been applied by the Stockley park hardware team, who have all been made redundant. When EDS' disaster recovery plan kicked in, switching processes to another Z10 at Mitcheldean in Gloucestershire, a similar lack of maintenance scuppered the stand-in machine. <snip> They perform their own microcode updates? I would have thought there were IBM CE's for that as part of 'normal' maintenance charges. Or maybe they just didn't give IBM the machine time? What sort of microcode fix (if not applied) causes an otherwise working machine to crash? The way this was written kid of negates the 'Mainframes never crash' (from a hardware perspective) idea. -----Original Message----- McKown, John >From The Register (Vulture Central). http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/17/eds_mainframe/ Two z10s crashed in the UK due to lack of microcode maintenance. The first one crashed. This caused a DR roll over to the second one, which then also crashed. I don't know how an application can cause a microcode problem. Likely a misstatement due to lack to knowledge. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
