Last week I had a customer with a downed POWER5 system due to hardware failure. The situation: The system bezel said that it couldn’t find the disk drives which could’ve been a number of failing parts. This system had a single disk drive mirrored to another. The backup was questionable (i.e., the customer couldn’t guarantee what was on it) on ¼ inch tapes so it was not really compatible with current technology. Also, the customer did not have an active hardware/software maintenance contract. The system was set up for operations…