Wayne Brown wrote:
...
>  When
> I asked why he'd spend $20,000 on a tape drive for one-time use, but not a
> few hundred for tapes we use every night, he told me the new drive came out
> of the conversion budget, but the tapes came from the operating budget.
> Funny, I always thought the budgets all came out of the same company's
> assets...
>
> That's one of the many reasons I no longer work there.

You sure this wasn't a University or College?:-)

An esteemed member of the administration here recently said something like
(referring to a prior administration of 4 or 5 years ago) "they couldn't
find $150,000 for a new machine, but they could find $1,000,000 for a new
[commercial software/oracle/unix] system".  Now, we have a couple of new
machines and can't much use the $1M system - it doesn't support our
academic policy needs and is too slow - so instead we're now going to move
forward with our "leagcy" system (on new hardware), which we could have
done previously for just the $150,000.

The connection to this thread is that the prior machine (that wasn't
replaced because we didn't have the $150,000) was a 960 - the big brother
of the 950.  This machine, like all HP 3000s, was of great value if it is
what you have to run you business on - we had a peak of 170 sessions all
doing database transactions on ours before it was replaced (we limited it
to "just" 170 because after that it *really* got too slow to even wait
for).  You'll have to ask (or pay) Jeff Kell to find out how you run 170
sessions doing database transactons on a 960.  I have trouble guessing
what ceiling our 969/120 running the same software will have - I don't
think we'll run into it anytime soon.

>
> Wayne

--
Richard L Gambrell
Database Administrator and
Consultant to Computing Services at UTC

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