This thread is an echo of my last 25+ years, Took the job in 1995 with the warning - "This may be a short contract - They are intending to get off the mainframe"
Survived Y2K by having programmers talented enough to add two digits to a field without rehosting to the new promised land. Watched attempt after attempt to avoid hardware upgrades, but the cost of maintaining out of support equipment was just not justifiable. Watched two different mainframes bought (without technical evaluation or recommendations) because a big chunk of money was found near the end of the fiscal year. Cried a little watching a brand new z15 and a DS8900 sit in the box for two years waiting for the move to a new datacenter. Migrated to that data center with zero down time. (great Team effort across all their tech teams) A nice highlight. Redesigned our DR plan twice as the technology improved (Move from offsite hot site, to Globally Mirrored hot site). RTO cut from hours and days, to seconds and minutes. Watched the threat of lawsuits that were just about filed until they finally paid their contracted obligations. Working full time now to get those final stragglers off the mainframe and to their final resting place in Windows/Unix/Client/Server heaven. Where the unicorns and fairies live. All of that while providing same day service on most of the same day problems that always pop up from somewhere. ----- Not too bad a life. Too bad it will finally end in less than a year ... Even if the new stuff fails... this old stuff will be shut down and trashed.... All hail politics and senior management promises. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
