the stret

Discussion Questions;

1. When UP first acquired Big Iron, what services did the system provide that gave UP a competitive advantage?
Up was between the first to acquire Big Iron.
Because it could efficiently schedule railroad car pickups and deliveries, the scheduling system gave UP a competitive advantage.
1-The railroad used the mainframe to roll out one of the earliest transaction processing systems.
2- UP was also the first railroad to develop a computerized car-scheduling system.

2. Why does UP feel that now is the time to replace its Big Iron system?
UP was one of many that was retiring Big Iron, IBM has recently suffered a 40 percent drop in mainframe revenues as businesses move to distribute systems. UP is replacing its Big Iron with blade systems from Dell and HP at a total cost of more than $150 million. The company is designing its system to grow, or scale, with the business, the hope is that the system will serve the company for as many decades as the original system did.
Critical Thinking Questions
1. What benefits does a distributed system running on many blade computers offer over a system running on a single mainframe computer?
 Moving to blade serves running on Linux operating system and reengineered code developed in today’s popular programming languages will make it easy for the company to recruit new computer science graduates to work on the system.
 Another reason for the change is that UP wants to offer its customers more detailed information about the movement of their shipments. UP wants to track the palettes of crates within the cars.
2. What should UP consider as it implements its new system to ensure that the new system can service the company for decades to com