Ben added these comments in the current discussion du jour ...
HP,
I've arranged a meeting this afternoon with some of the BM
consultants to discuss issues such as how we've complained to
IBM, what response we've received, and how we can escalate it
further. Also if we know/can find out why BM hogs so much
memory. So I will post back my findings after that.
For now, I've posted some more comments below...
Ben, I've left the entire thread between you and I in place and
interleaved some longer comments for you. Please scroll down.
And, if I've come across as some kinda twit, I apologize, I've
just been having a tough time as you'll see below trying to get
into your head a bit to understand your issues and frustrations.
I'll find out this afternoon what has been said, and how its
been escalated within IBM. I don't know IF we actually pay to
be a business partner. I know to become one we had to have a
certain number of certifications, and do a certain amount of
business selling their products. I will find out for sure this
afternoon.
I think you are right; it is more of a preferential treatment
source for small and medium size businesse. IBM is organized
along the size of a company and it's potential for business with
them and have an organization that I always thought was a classic
example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was
doing. So, since they have small, medium, and enterprise, i.e.,
very large, sales and support organizations, you can actually be
called on or investigate on your own and get one of these 3 and
they literally do not know what their own company, IBM, is doing
in the other 2!
I found that very frustrating when I sat for hours listening a
presentations on HW and SW my company was evaluating only to find
out that the IBM unit I was in actually couldn't even sell to me!
So, in your case, while your friendly IBM sales droid and/or
business partner rep may or may not get paid by your company and
may or may not listen to you, in fact, may or may not even pass
on or escalate your issue within IBM, you DO pay for the software
itself, do you not? And, whatever the number of PCs on your WAN
in whatever geographic locations they are, obviously not where
you live and work, I am certain that you either paid a ton of
money to license, i.e., buy the SW that is "flaky" or you may
even be paying a monthly or quarterly license fee, sort of like
leasing the SW. In the case of my company, we had about every way
you could think of to acquire and maintain IBM products, from HW
and SW to training and support, etc.
Now, keeping in mind what I said above wrt the arcane way IBM is
- or, at least was, organized for sales and support, there may be
IBM people local to your internal customers at some sort of
regional center but not necessarily a short distance away. e.g.,
they may be HQ in a large city someplace in state(s) you have
offices or plants. But, and this is important, depending on the
terms of the license agreement with IBM, you MAY be paying for
support as well as pure usage. Again, I'm not necessarily
accusing you of some black ops thing here, but I just don't know
enough about your situation to make intelligent comments wrt IBM.
If your company IS paying for support directly or indirectly, why
aren't you getting it? And, if you're not satisfied, why not stop
the payments if you can?
I am neither an attorney nor a purchasing person, so you have to
take my comments and suggestions at face value, if you can, and
confer privately within your own company. I can say this with
confidence, however, since I had experience. If your company is
paying a periodic license fee for Business Modeler and you stop
payment, it is a VERY good idea for your company attorney to
advise you first. At the least, you get the IBM sales droid and
the district manager in to talk. Describe your needs and your
intent, but obviously do not threaten anything. IF your company
does decide to temporarily withold licensing/leasing payments on
any IBM PCs, servers, SQL, NOS, application SW, whatever, then it
is a VERY good idea to place the fees into an escrow account of
sorts. The reason for this is two-fold: 1) your bean counters
won't accidently ding your boss's budget or use money they think
they are "saving" somehow on another project and 2) it makes your
legal case FAR stronger should you decide to seek damages in
court. Perhaps there's even a 3), which would be to counter an
IBM lawsuit for non-payment.
The bottom line here seems to me to be how to gain some leverage
since so far you've been unsuccessful in implementing a technical
fix yourself, with your admins, or even consultants, and you need
help desperately. So, while it may turn out to be a technical
issue either with IBM itself or through some obscure interaction
with some other SW you run, it may also be a management/business
problem you need to solve first.
Wrong sort of consultant - my fault, we've called them
'Consultants' historically - these aren't computer
consultants, they are our Business Analysts consultants, who
go onsite, and use Business Modeler to look at internal
business processes. Most of them aren't very computer
literate, to be honest. They know how to use BM, but nothing
about the internal workings.
Ben, I've been whacking on you quite hard because the terms you
use are either unfamiliar to me totally or you're using them in
non-traditional ways. You implied to me, or I perceived you did,
that it was a technical consultant telling you that he/she had
exhausted all attempts to get BM to run in a stable way. What I
now interpret you to mean is that you are paying business
consultants who you pay to assist your employees to USE BM, not
fix it. Is that right?
So, now that I have a somewhat clearer understanding, that
probably explains why your company appears to me as wed at the
hip to this particular app - your company may be relying to a
great degree on what BM tells your people and the consultants
that you should or should not do from a business standpoint. If I
have that at all correct, then "flaky" SW means lost revenues and
lost profits. See where I'm going here?
We don't run BM under VM, we tried, but its to slow, to the
point of being able to type a sentance, then sit and watch as
each charactor apears. We run other IBM software under VM, and
it works without issue, mostly. However, due to BM requiring
so much memory, by the time you have a base build with says
4GB, (really 3gb) then install WinXP & Office, for day 2 day
use, then VMWare, and create a VM machine allocate that 2GB,
then install WinXP in the VM, which will use at least 512mb,
it leaves 1.5GB or less inside the VM to run BM. This is why
we had to drop the VM idea for the BM users, and just install
it directly on the base build. It runs a lot faster on the
base build, but then gets this 'corruption' issue, when the
user, who isn't a local admin, has to re-install.
OK. I am having real problems following your comments and
comparing what I think you're saying to my personal experience
with IBM, small, medium, and large-scale computer systems,
Windows, etc. I thought you'd said, or again, I simply perceived
it, that you were 2 or 3 layers deep into some weird VM system
based on an SQL server or some such thing that your IT people
apparently put into place to protect the system from dumb or
malicious employees, malware, whatever. No, I'm not insulting
your people, those are the goals of a properly run IT department,
it just isn't what end-users want to hear. Managers really don't
want to disect IT issues, they want to run a business and lack of
ability to model their business - whatever your goods or services
are - and get on with the job. And, I perceive that you are
caught somewhere in the middle. Maybe you're feeling heat from
above or maybe you're just a good support person trying to help
associates that cannot work.
Will find out this afternoon.
I believe IBM have released a number of fix packs for products
such as WebSphere MQ, Process Server & Application Server etc,
along with DB2, all of which addressed specific issues.
Again, I really do not understand nearly enough to comment
intelligently, so I'll just throw out some thoughts here. LARGE
HW/SW systems typically release "service packs" not unlike the
way that MS does, in bits and pieces and periodically in large
chunks, like a Windows SP. Your systems software people, network
people, security people, admins, etc. obviously install this
stuff and test it internally - at least, I sure as hell hope they
do! - and if it don't work, they don't install it across the
company. In my personal experience somewhat earlier in my career
where I was responsible for all CAD and PC support, training,
testing, etc. for engineering in a very large company, Chrysler,
that it was not at all uncommon for something to go bump in the
night during testing. Thus, we'd send people in on a Sunday to do
the enterprise upgrades and have them in before everybody arrived
on Monday morning for work. Several times/year, we'd have to
literally lock all of engineering out for awhile, uninstall a
service pack, and roll the system back, analagous to doing a
system restore via a Windows RP. I imagine you can see that MY
management wasn't all that exited about 10,000 people, or some
part of that, sitting on their hands for hours - they had this
silly-ass view that their job was designing cars!
See above comments on the consultants. And I agree, management
don't want users to have local admin access, but want them to
be able to re-install software. I feel like I'm stuck between
a rock and a hard place, trying to impliment this, sometimes!
There is, ibm.software.websphere...has a number of newsgroups
underit, but I posted a similar question to this back in
Novemeber last year, and it still has no answer. There are
only a dozen or so posts, so it doesn't look like anyone ever
gets a reply, or answers. There is a KB on the IBM website,
but its a nightmare to search through, the site is painfully
slow, and usually timesout. I'll find out this afternoon if
there is a better resource for help/support.
Look, Ben, I need to stand down here. I'm not really helping you,
but am probably annoying the hell outta you. I'll just say this:
unless your company is literally a mom and pop store and YOU are
its sole IT "department", I think you need to stop trying to get
unofficial help and throw some money at this. e.g., hire a
technical consultant to come in, analyze your system and find the
root cause. I won't go into the subject of quality control, but
suffice it to say that any real problem may have multiple
problems, but has at least one so-called "root cause". You can
fix ALL the other problems, and I think you've made a valiant
attempt to do that, but if you don't find and fix the root cause,
the problem will continue. And, "root cause" isn't at all the
same thing as "main cause", meaning "biggest". It may be a
niggling small detail somebody overlooked, maybe at IBM, maybe at
your company, maybe by the people that designed your IT system
(s).
I'll try and run some tools across the machines to try and
find out exactly what is causing the memory hog. Process
Explorer from SysInternals should be able to show something
interesting.
Since this is a Windows XP issue, albeit a complex one, clearly
the place to start is to have your users just look at the
processes running in Task Manager. In case you're not all that
familiar with it, you can quickly sort on process name, which
includes all the background tasks not just the stuff on your
people's Taskbar, CPU usage on a real-time basis, memory usage
real-time, HD and memory page faults, read/write request to your
HDs or network servers, etc. Certainly, more sophisticated tools
would be better. Again, I'm not trying to insult you or whack on
you but neither of us know the other so I have no real clue as
to what you mean by "run some tools across the machines", so I
will just say this:
GOOD LUCK, I THINK YOU'RE GONNA NEED IT!. To the extent you want
to continue with a dialog here or anywhere, I'll try to be
helpful and tone down being judgmental and we'll go from there.
