| Amount invested: |
$16M plus |
| Organization: |
Services company |
| Original Plans: |
To replace a mainframe system with an HP client/server system to "lower the costs of computing". The requirement was for a 20GB database and concurrent access for as many as 100 users. For this company an 'acceptable' response time was 20-30 seconds, since the application was complex and the mainframe system being replaced was batch oriented, very old and slow. |
| Unanticipated problems: |
The new system and Unix application could not
support 100 users, with a response time of 120 seconds being quite common
with only 50 users online. With the required 100 users online this
frequently increased to 5 minutes and the system became unstable with
crashes and loss of data. The user replaced the initial HP Unix system with
one from Sequent but there was only a minimal improvement. The number of
support staff had doubled during the three years this project was being
attempted and the lack of systems management software caused a number
of catastrophic failures with some data lost and never recovered. The true
cost of this has never been discovered but is certainly in the order of
$10m.
|
| Project Status: |
The user scrapped the Unix project, upgraded their
original mainframe system and improved the old legacy applications with a
GUI front end. This met all of their needs at a cost of just $3m with an
annual ongoing cost of less than half of the Unix system. |
