During the Fall Semester 2003 registration in August the existing mainframe was not able to handle the peak registration activity. This created a particularly bad experience for the Columbia campus. A group was formed to study these problems and make recommendations for their correction.
The Project Team recommended a two-step approach to meeting the above goal prior to the peak registration period for the Winter 2004 Semester which occurs in early January 2004.
The first item was completed prior to the October registration period.
The second item has been approved and is being planned at this time. The new system is to be operational no later than December 28, 2003 in preparation for the January registration period.
Replacing the current processor with the new processor will require some other major equipment and software changes.
There are two major hardware issues that must be addressed before the mainframe can be replaced.
There are software considerations that must be evaluated before any upgrade can be done.
The new processor will have features that we will exploit to provide additional performance improvements. For example, the new processor will have two additional network interfaces. All network traffic to the current processor goes thru one interface. All terminal (TN3270), file transfer, email and other traffic now goes thru the Cisco 7507 Router. On the new processor, the terminal (TN3270) traffic will remain on the Cisco router and all other IP traffic will use a new network interface.
An IBM Enterprise Storage Server (ESS) with 840Gb of storage has been ordered to replace all current disk. Data on the internal disk must be migrated first. This must be done before any meaningful testing can be done on the new processor.
The data from the external disk will also be migrated to the new disk, but this does not have to be complete prior to December 28, 2003.
This upgrade will require the end of 3380 disk support. Two 3380 volumes remain in use. All other 190+ volumes are 3390 format. The remaining users of 3380 disk have been notified individually.
All current CART (3480) tape used by batch jobs will be replaced with 3490E technology. (Eight 3490-C22 drives)
3480 technology records about 200Mb of data (uncompressed) on a tape using 18 data tracks. 3490E technology doubles the capacity of the tape using 36 data tracks. The general rules for 3480 to 3490E conversion and interchange are:
3490E drives can READ our current tapes. When a scratch tape is first used on a 3490E drive, it will be converted to 36 track automatically. Once written on the new drives, tapes become unreadable by the old drives. Because of this, the new drives will completely replace the old drives at the conversion time. No JCL changes should be required to move production jobs to the new drives, with the possible exception of jobs that add data to existing tape volumes or existing tape files. This might be done using DISP=MOD to add to a file or adding additional files to a existing master tape. For these jobs, a new tape volume will need to be started at the time of the 3490E conversion.
We have no way of knowing what techniques are being used to process V-Series tapes. The rules above apply to V-Series tapes as well as to any foreign tape in the library being used for output.
We still encourage users of V-Series tapes to convert to pool tapes (P-series). Support for problems resulting from the use of V-Series tapes will handled at a lower priority than other problems.
We will retain 4 of our current 3480 drives for an undetermined period of time for any data exchange need. The new drives can READ any 3480 or 3490E tape we might receive, but if we need to send data somewhere that is limited to 3480 drives, the old drives will be needed. JCL changes will be needed to access the 3480 drives after conversion to the new drives.
This is the planned sequence of events by start date. The duration of each event is noted. The sequence of completion is not necessarily the same as the start sequence.
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