Tim Hare wrote:
One of the good intangibles about z/OS (and, MVS/ESA, and MVS/XA, and.. )
reliability is that when you call support with a problem, they usually
work on the problem. With those "other guys" and even with some vendors on
z/OS who code on other platforms and then port to z/oS, you often spend
the first day or two convincing them that there *is* a problem and that
the problem *is* in their code. IBM's mainframe support, on the other
hand, usually assumes that you are *not* a clueless person and that when
you call, a problem *does* exist. While it's hard to measure, I do
believe that this contributes to a faster problem resolution cycle and
therefore improved reliability.
It goes _much_ further than that...
*We* have a culture that focuses on post-mortem analysis -- probably
because we "grew up" with batch processing. Our processes involves
making the system and infrastructure code capable of capturing as much
useful information as possible at the time of a failure. An SVC dump
contains storage, state information, system trace, etc. IPCS provides
formatters for system data and a programmable infrastructure for
creating/inserting our own.
*They* have a culture of attempting to reproduce errors on a development
machine with a debugger present -- a system that simply cannot find
subtle, timing- or location-dependent, or environmental errors ... plain
and simple. I have seen dumps being taken on other platforms (e.g.,
Windows). But, I have yet to find a programmer that knows how read one. :-(
--
Edward E Jaffe
Phoenix Software International, Inc
5200 W Century Blvd, Suite 800
Los Angeles, CA 90045
310-338-0400 x318
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.phoenixsoftware.com/
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