I'm not sure what the actual intent is, but I received an email from my P/390 client, wanting to explore the possibilities of upgrading to the MP3000 (about $3K on the used market). Right now, I don't know if this would be the disaster recovery machine, or a replacement for the existing P/390 (with, perhaps, a second box for disaster recovery).
My gut says that this will come down to dollars as they are happy with the current box (running VM/ESA 2.4). It is a straight VM box. However I've made some "modifications" to it. I have a 256GB NAS unit up under the OS/2 side with a couple dozen 3390-3 drives defined. The rest of the space is used to store emulated 3420 tape drives. When they had real 3410 drives, we converted about 12,000 volumes to emulated drives on OS/2. The NAS is backed up weekly via a SDLT drive. I need to keep the same or similar setup on the new box. Printing is via IP and we TN3270 in. The only program products installed are Sort, VM/Archive, VM/Tape and VM/Backup. I wrote a tape robotics system using PROP and REXX to respond to tape mounts from the products, use the OS/2 MOUNT command to mount the emulated tape, and pass the drive to the user. Been working fine for about 5 years so far. And, of course, it makes me a little nervous about going to a different box. When I had a MP3000, I believe the I/O rate on it's emulated drives was similar to the P/390, that is about 50 I/Os per second. I should be able to mount a NAS on the MP/3000s' OS/2 side and keep everything the same. I think we would have to have, at least one set of Internal drives, in order to have the disk space that the P/390 had. So, for those that have upgraded from the P/390, do you have any strong beliefs or "gotchas" when you did your upgrade? Thanks Tom Duerbusch THD Consulting
