MEMORANDUM

TO:     Bill O'Brien
FROM:   Keith Corbett
DATE:   8/17/87
SUBJ:   ASK Upgrade Problems
COPY:   Ron Genest, Clovis Regis, Sandi Stewart

Sandi, Mark and I had a very interesting meeting with ASK this morning.
According to their technical specialists, 
  
  1. ASK has absolutely no experience with Local-Area MicroVAX clusters;
  but they don't think it will work.  Maybe they'll try it out and see.
  
  2. It is not possible to expand our MicroVAX beyond 9mb of memory.

ASK suggests that instead of clustering or upgrading, we should arrange to
swap our MicroVAX with them for one that can be upgraded to a configuration
with more memory and disk capacity to support 20 users.

But they also claimed that a MicroVAX can support 3 users per 1mb of memory
(after 2mb for VMS). If this were true, I calculate that we could support 8
users comfortably with what we have, and should only need 9mb for 21 users.
Then why couldn't we simply buy the additional 4mb they say we can
install?? 

My technical source at Hamilton-Avnet says our machine is standard, and can
be expanded both in disk and memory. For best results, we could buy a
higher-speed, higher-capacity disk, along with a cabinet required to
enclose our existing hardware with the disk.  This would be much cheaper
than buying and clustering a second MicroVAX; however, an upgraded system
would not have as much capacity in terms of users, or the future upgrade
potential, that a cluster would provide.

Now for the worst part.  The $35K we paid for ASK/Serviceman, it turns out,
only licenses us to run it on an 8-user VAX system.  The fee for upgrading
to an additional 8 users normally costs $40,000 -- but Clyde says he'll see
what he can to do bring the price of this down.

I don't believe ASKs technical assessment of our situation.  I don't
believe ASK has our best interests in mind.  And I'm sure Clyde knew we
were planning to install an additional 8 users for ServiceMan when he
quoted it!

So, the good news is, we can increase our capacity without going to a
second VAX and clustering.  The bad news: it could cost us over $75K,
because of ASK's license fee; but this is negotiable, since they're such
good guys, and they're our buddies, and we're going to buy more hardware
from them.

Perhaps it would help if you would speak to a "higher authority" at ASK to
straighten out the apparent discrepancies in their story, and clear the air
surrounding this license fee, which strikes me as highway robbery.

KMC