-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:ibm-m...@bama.ua.edu] On
Behalf Of Carl Swanson
Sent: Friday, February 12, 2010 2:30 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu
Subject: Re: End of service for 3490-A20 and 3490-B40
Having worked for a hardware vendor big in tape and tape
libraries,
I can understand IBM wanting to stop servicing these drives. What may
actually be occurring is they are losing the ability to service (repair)
these devices. I would not be surprised to find that the parts required
are
no longer being made. I think IBM most likely did a Last Time Buy of
these
parts to continue servicing these devices for a extended period of time
(think 5 years after EOS was announced as required for any device listed
on
a US GSA contract). I would not be surprised to find that IBM kept
servicing
them beyond the 5 years.
At some time it just becomes more cost effective for all parties
involved to move on to new technologies. There are a number of reasons
why
maintenance prices go up as products get older. This generally falls
into 2
categories; 1) The company has a replacement product available and would
like customers to buy that one. 2) Parts are becoming hard to get and
the
skills necessary to service these products are expensive. If you want to
keep using these devices buy a number of them cheap and when one breaks
replace it with its spare, this should keep you going for awhile, and
probably cost less than you were paying for maintenance.
<SNIPPAGE>
I understand that set of reasons for dumping the big units. But when one
can obtain SCSI based 3480/90 drives (or even 6250 BPI reel to reel
drives!), it becomes obvious that there is a market or need for these.
So, it would seem that IBM would/could purchase some kind of replacement
and "brand it" and make it available rather than dumping this entirely.
But then, look at the kill of PSI by acquisition. The "new" demand for
the low end media and support (which I would go to the SCSI drive makers
for FLEX and/or PSI systems) is terminated by this. This also forces all
IBM SCP customers to keep moving up in hardware or quit.
Notice that these 3480/90 type SCSI based drives are available to *nix,
Windows, etc. systems. There seems to be some demand for this technology
(as I was saying in an earlier post about "End of service for 3490-A20
and 3490-B40 -- Small Twist") else this market would have dried up and
died.
The only headache here is connecting these SCSI drives to a z/x box
because the controllers have to now have a SCSI backend (IBM is already
doing it, look at the ATLs and the fact that they are using SCSI drives
internally).
Regards,
Steve Thompson
-- Opinions expressed by this poster may not reflect the opinion(s) held
by poster's employer --
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