R.S. wrote:
Not necessarily. 1000 FICON connections sounds seriously, but in fact it
means 2000 connectors "clicks". It has to be done be some human - hasn't
it? So the only additional task for the human is to note cable number
and port number. 2000 records. IMHO spreadsheet is sufficient as an
application.
Not sure exactly what you mean by 2000 clicks.. but if it were that simple yes a spreadsheet would
suffice.. in fact it's what I end up using (with the data extracted out of SAS). But my issue is
trying to get all the relevant data together and most *importantly* keeping it up to date without
lots of manual updating. The other aspect of large sites that I didn't mention is that the hardware
config tends to change on a very regular basis. The hardware upgrade process, ie DASD, zbox, is such
a continual task that they typically have dedicated teams with perhaps 3 or 4 staff just doing
hardware planning and HCD! Keeping it all updated is very time consuming!
> Of course - if some installation has no such data, it would be nightmare
> to re-create it.
> However - *assuming your cables has unique id's* - it's not so hard to
> check and eliminate single documentation mistakes or "white spaces".
> Recipe:
> 1. Print the doco for relevant piece of HW (CPC, dasd box, switch)
> 2. Open cabinet doors and check each cable one by one against the
> printed documentation.
Well yes, nice in theory.. and it's what we have to do now and then. Not only does it take a very
long time, but tracing fibres is prone to causing error - have you ever seen fully populated IBM FTS
cabinets!
My point is that we shouldn't have to do all this manual collating of data. If I can use the HCD API
to extract other HMC type information such as IOCDS detail, LPAR IPL Details (albeit unsupported!)
why cant the same interface be used to get all the physical hardware details such as IO Cards
installed and how they connect to STIs and Books. It would be so much easier and more accurate than
looking on ResourceLink. And for new installs, the CFR files could just be loaded into HCD. In fact
I never really understood why the Chpid Mapping tool was never integrated with HCD.
Cheers
roy
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