One of the big weekends of the year has just ended for an army of IBM installation engineers putting in new 3090S machines.The three-day Memorial Day break means a trip to the beach for many New Yorkers, but for the Teamsters who drive the trucks that deliver the mainframes and the disk drives, it is a weekend of high activity.The reasons are that roads are clear and its possible to drive a big truck down the narrow streets around Wall Street – and in the City of London for that matter, offices are empty, and there’s a good chance that with three days to get a big machine in and shake it down, it may well be ready to be handed over to the customer by Tuesday morning.And this weekend will have been more nerve-tingling than usual for many an IBM sales engineer, because the migration from the E to the S generation of 3090s has proved significantly more problematic than the move from base models to E models.Despite scare stories about large numbers of 3090S machines having Thermal Conduction Module or logic problems that are causing havoc to IBM’s delivery schedules, most problems are being fixed within a few days, but the uncertainties are sufficient that IBM is still much keener to shake down a machine in the factory than to do it at the customer site, so that users are likely to get earlier delivery if they sell on their E machine and take a new-build S than if they ask for their E to be field-upgraded.It is therefore ironic that a particular concentration of nervous energy will have been expended this weekend on a new-build 3090-600S at one of Merrill Lynch’s sites.Lurid stories of Thermal Conduction Module meltdown proved way wide of the mark, but on Thursday night last week, the machine did still have an unidentified logic problem, and was preventing Merrill from getting rid of a 3090-400 the new one is to replace.And that kind of hold-up is a problem if a leasing company already has a new home for the 400 and a customer waiting, and has to look elsewhere for a similar machine to fulfil the requirement. And on how the weekend went, and how many of the machines that went in can be signed over to the customer this week or next will depend whether IBM can start feeling comfortable about its second quarter figures, or have to put the staff at panic stations in order to salvage the quarter.
