Greg Shirey writes: >Since we are revealing personal opinions, I'm not all that shocked to hear >that my state government has 31 data centers. This is a big state, after >all, spread out over a lot of land and with a lot of people living here to >serve, and with a lot of employees. Now, I know you can have a centralized >data center and have remote connections - in fact, the company I work for >does just that. (We have 6 warehouses that connect to our mainframe here in >Fort Worth; when someone in Little Rock uses his wireless scanner on a >barcode attached to product in the warehouse, it reads & updates VSAM files >here via a CICS transaction.) However, we are one company doing essentially >one thing. The state government has many missions, and, while keeping costs >under control and cooperating on security and DR are good things, they are >not the most important things -- successfully serving the public is. It >might not take 31 data centers, but it just might require more than 2. Who >am I to judge?
I agree with the last question, for sure. Since I don't work for the State of Texas I'm guessing on a lot of this. I agree that service quality is important. (Offering zero services is "free," after all. :-)) But it's very likely the 31 data centers weren't very good at delivering high quality services to Texas citizens. If you think for half a minute about the integration challenges between and among applications running in so many data centers it quickly becomes apparent that citizens could be very frustrated with the status quo. Any business process involving multi-agency interactions might be very difficult with the present arrangement. >I doubt all the IT employees will still be employed when (and if) it is all >said and done, and it seems likely there will be some number less of >mainframe shops. More sysprogs out there looking for work, I fear, and less >places to find it... All the press stories were quite enthusiastic about Texas IT staffing levels. The AP story, for example, claims that IT staff can continue to work in their current locations. It's the data centers (servers) that are going to be consolidated, not the people work locations. As far as staffing levels, the press stories seem to imply natural attrition only, not layoffs. My guess is that, in this deal, the mainframe-related staff will do especially well. Texas has 16 mainframes, according to reports, which strikes me as a reasonable number. It's everything else that got out of hand. (If you want to view it more strongly: this case demonstrated the failure of too-distributed computing.) Bringing everything into two data centers could result in some discoveries that there are workloads running on lots of little servers that really properly belong, for financial and other reasons, on the mainframe, whether it's z/OS or Linux. We'll see, but that's quite possible or even probable. Ed Finnell writes: >Seems like the fifth estate has it's own agenda for it's own purposes, not >necessarily the public interest. I'm encouraged by the recent growth of "open source" journalism. As in the 1700s with the pamphleteers, anybody can set up a Web site and go into the journalism business, doing original investigative reporting. A lot of people are doing just that, and I think it's great. By the way, major news out of Indiana: IBM (as team leader) won a big contract there, too. I wish I had something, anything to do with these two state contract wins. :-) Here's the AP story: http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/061129/apfn_ibm_indiana_programs.html?.v=1 Personal opinions. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Specializing in Software Architectures Related to System z Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan and IBM Asia-Pacific E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
