-----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 -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html