I think the car analogy with computer systems breaks down on a number
of points (at least in the case of mainframes):
(1) while bleeding-edge-current is certainly not essential, the
further you get behind on software maintenance, the more costly it gets
in terms of time and person-hours to get reasonably current; and without
being reasonably current you may not be able to utilize new hardware
that could be more cost effective, or needed when old hardware dies, or
needed to adapt to growing business requirements. The cost of failure
to do preventive maintenance on a car is bounded by the time and cost
for replacement transportation, no matter how much maintenance was skipped.
(2)software maintenance relating to security or data exposures may
need prompt attention to avoid much more expensive data loss or data
exposure scenarios, which may also have serious legal implications.
Failure to do preventive maintenance on a car doesn't generally make it
more susceptible to hackers or have legal implications, unless you fail
to repair an obvious safety hazard and that results in a personal-injury
accident or death..
(3)Unexpected failures of a lesser-maintained car more often than
not just causes a temporary loss of availability which with sufficient
funds can be easily resolved, as there are many ready substitutes for
the basic function of transportation. A corporate computer system has
company-specific data and company-specific applications which cannot
just be replaced by any generic computer system, and it may be
impossible for the company to stay in business very long without that
data and those applications. Recovery from some software failures that
result in data loss is only possible with adequate DR planning in place,
and if adequate planning was not in place, recovery may not even be
possible at any price. While I believe a valid argument can be made
against applying maintenance just for the sake of maintenance, some of
the problems addressed by HIPER PTFs are so dire you really don't want
to wait for that failure to occur before installing the fix.
Even with a car, while it may be cost-effective to avoid or stretch out
some preventive or recommended maintenance, I strongly suspect it would
not on balance be cheaper for you to take that to the extreme and, say,
never change the engine oil (unless of course your plan is to sell
the.car after a few years without disclosing the potential shortened
engine life and cheat the next owner).
Joel C. Ewing
On 11/23/2016 11:33 AM, Jesse 1 Robinson wrote:
> When I get flak about the churn of staying current with maintenance, I climb
> my soapbox. Look, I say, I've calculated that on balance it's cheaper to
> drive your car as long as it runs rather than take in for periodic
> maintenance, which is both time consuming and out-of-pocket costly. Most
> likely it will fail somewhere down the road ;-) but getting it fixed then
> will be cheaper and quicker overall.
>
> Well, I say, if you wouldn't think of managing your car that way, why would
> you think it makes sense for a computer system?
>
> .
> .
> J.O.Skip Robinson
> Southern California Edison Company
> Electric Dragon Team Paddler
> SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager
> 323-715-0595 Mobile
> 626-302-7535 Office
> robin...@sce.com
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
> Behalf Of John McKown
> Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2016 5:01 AM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: (External):A true discussion in today's world (at least here)
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/23/stay_out_of_my_server_room/
> [quote]
>
> Administrators spend a great deal of time doing preventative maintenance.
> Keeping the servers running doesn't mean putting out fires as they come, it
> means planning for hypothetical scenarios with the resources available.
> This type of work doesn't immediately present a benefit, and when the time
> comes to cut some chaff, perception is key.
>
> Management droids who've never experienced the pain of an outage might not
> have the same respect for having the hardware on hand as you and me, and the
> blame cannon is somehow never pointed at the penny-pincher who thought doing
> without a support contract was an acceptable risk.
>
> [quote/]
>
> --
> Heisenberg may have been here.
>
> Unicode: http://xkcd.com/1726/
>
> Maranatha! <><
> John McKown
>
> ...
--
Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR jcew...@acm.org
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