Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?
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@dave247 said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
@scottalanmiller said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
Dollars to donuts, the guy was using the term "blade" to mean the opposite of a blade, a rack server. Blade, rack and tower are the three physical form factors of servers. But for some reason, even though they are names for competing factors, there was a period of time when everyone wanted to sound cool and thought that blade sounded better than "normal every day server" so they started calling their standard rack servers blades. Much how people later used cloud for everything, even when it was anything but cloud.
There is no logical reason any small bank would run blades, even the Wall St. firms don't ahve enough servers to normal justify them. He's almost certainly unsure what is a blade and what is an iSeries and so forth. I could be wrong, but it's very likely given the statement - even if not relayed word for word. Since the only logical alternative he'd be seeing would be AMD64 based rack servers - it would be extremely odd if he was seeing blade servers in any bank, especially as an alternative to i Series.
hmm.. yeah I think you might be right about that. When he said "blade", I did secretly wonder if he actually just meant like a regular rack server... that's probably what he meant. It didn't seem like they really knew a lot about IT even though they were the designated federal examiners for IT.
I think "even though" is the problem there. It would be mind blowing if a federal examiner had the first clue about IT. Government jobs don't tend towards the technical. And auditor / examiner jobs are the least technical of those. Not that someone in that role couldn't be smart and take an interest in IT, but if they were smart or interested in IT you'd expect them to have a fulfilling, rewarding career in IT rather than doing a boring auditing job.
There's nothing unexpected there. As a job role, you'd expect no IT skills or experience in that position. They get a checklist and they check it off without knowing what the checkboxes mean.
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It looks like Unitrends can work with iSeries. I'm not sure they can offer whatever services you need. But it looks like you could buy one of their appliances and set it up to replicate offsite.
http://guides.unitrends.com/documents/rs-ueb-admin-guide/content/satori/iseries_backups_overview.htm
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@bnrstnr said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
It looks like Unitrends can work with iSeries. I'm not sure they can offer whatever services you need. But it looks like you could buy one of their appliances and set it up to replicate offsite.
http://guides.unitrends.com/documents/rs-ueb-admin-guide/content/satori/iseries_backups_overview.htm
ooh cool, thanks!!
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Unitrends works with pretty much everything. That's its claim to fame.
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Unitrends cannot do DR, no one can, for iSeries as you need iSeries gear to do it.
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@scottalanmiller said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
Unitrends cannot do DR, no one can, for iSeries as you need iSeries gear to do it.
Is there no way to virtulaize iSeries systems or something?
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@dave247 said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
@scottalanmiller said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
Unitrends cannot do DR, no one can, for iSeries as you need iSeries gear to do it.
Is there no way to virtulaize iSeries systems or something?
Yes, there is, but only on iSeries gear. All iSeries is virtualized, always has been.
Remember, things that you think of as virtual are always AMD64 workloads on AMD64 hardware. But there is Power workloads so you need Power virtualization.
Virtualization is not a tool for getting disparate platforms running on other gear. That's emulation which is expensive and slow. And Power is far more powerful than AMD64 (making the name quite apropos) so emulating / virtualizing Power on AMD64 would be ridiculously slow if someone was to try to do it.
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So if you had a datacenter full of iSeries gear, you could do DR to it if you were licensed to do so. but no one except IBM is likely to maintain that kind of gear.
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@scottalanmiller said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
@dave247 said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
@scottalanmiller said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
Unitrends cannot do DR, no one can, for iSeries as you need iSeries gear to do it.
Is there no way to virtulaize iSeries systems or something?
Yes, there is, but only on iSeries gear. All iSeries is virtualized, always has been.
Remember, things that you think of as virtual are always AMD64 workloads on AMD64 hardware. But there is Power workloads so you need Power virtualization.
Virtualization is not a tool for getting disparate platforms running on other gear. That's emulation which is expensive and slow. And Power is far more powerful than AMD64 (making the name quite apropos) so emulating / virtualizing Power on AMD64 would be ridiculously slow if someone was to try to do it.
ok I am confused now. Are you saying that iSeries is a virtual system while Power is the hardware? In my case, I have a Power 720, which is obviously a physical system, but I thought it was also referred to as an "i Series" (previously Series i) but also referred to as AS400. Or are these different things? I have read through the wikipedia page a few times but it's not really making it all that clear.
So I am trying to compare it to ESXi which is what I'm more familiar with. I have a Dell server with Intel chips and obviously ESXi runs on that as the hypervisor and then ESXi allows me to hosts my virtual machines. So how exactly does a Power system work compared to that?
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@dave247 said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
ok I am confused now. Are you saying that iSeries is a virtual system while Power is the hardware?
Power is the architecture. Like Sparc, ARM64, AMD64, IA32, IA64, etc. Everything on Power has always been virtualized. Outside of the commodity Intel and AMD worlds, basically everything has been virtual since the 1960s. The very concept of physical has been only for the tiniest systems for decades.
So AIX, iSeries, z.... they've all been 100% virtualized since day one. There is no such thing as a physical deployment because Power virtualizes at the hardware level.
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@dave247 said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
In my case, I have a Power 720, which is obviously a physical system, but I thought it was also referred to as an "i Series" (previously Series i) but also referred to as AS400.
Power 720 is the server name. Power is the architecture. Series i is the name of the operating system. AS/400 hasn't existed since the 1990s and is the name of the hardware that ran OS/400 that turned into i Series. AS/400 should never be used as name for anything as it is specific hardware that was dead almost twenty years ago. People calling things AS/400 have no idea what the words that they are using mean.
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@scottalanmiller said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
@dave247 said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
ok I am confused now. Are you saying that iSeries is a virtual system while Power is the hardware?
Power is the architecture. Like Sparc, ARM64, AMD64, IA32, IA64, etc. Everything on Power has always been virtualized. Outside of the commodity Intel and AMD worlds, basically everything has been virtual since the 1960s. The very concept of physical has been only for the tiniest systems for decades.
So AIX, iSeries, z.... they've all been 100% virtualized since day one. There is no such thing as a physical deployment because Power virtualizes at the hardware level.
I understand the words and sentences, but I don't really understand what you're saying... WHAT is being virtualized exactly?
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@dave247 said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
So I am trying to compare it to ESXi which is what I'm more familiar with. I have a Dell server with Intel chips and obviously ESXi runs on that as the hypervisor and then ESXi allows me to hosts my virtual machines. So how exactly does a Power system work compared to that?
Power is the architecture. Power 7 or Power 8 would be the specific processor. There is no hypervisor needed in the Power world as it has always had hardware virtualization. Anything on Power is already virtual before you even start installing an OS, so while you can put a software hypervisor on top of Power, it's never necessary for virtualization.
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@dave247 said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
@scottalanmiller said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
@dave247 said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
ok I am confused now. Are you saying that iSeries is a virtual system while Power is the hardware?
Power is the architecture. Like Sparc, ARM64, AMD64, IA32, IA64, etc. Everything on Power has always been virtualized. Outside of the commodity Intel and AMD worlds, basically everything has been virtual since the 1960s. The very concept of physical has been only for the tiniest systems for decades.
So AIX, iSeries, z.... they've all been 100% virtualized since day one. There is no such thing as a physical deployment because Power virtualizes at the hardware level.
I understand the words and sentences, but I don't really understand what you're saying... WHAT is being virtualized exactly?
Virtualization refers to making virtual systems, the OS runs on that virtual system. The term virtualization always refers to this no matter what platform or product you use.
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@scottalanmiller said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
@dave247 said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
In my case, I have a Power 720, which is obviously a physical system, but I thought it was also referred to as an "i Series" (previously Series i) but also referred to as AS400.
Power 720 is the server name. Power is the architecture. Series i is the name of the operating system. AS/400 hasn't existed since the 1990s and is the name of the hardware that ran OS/400 that turned into i Series. AS/400 should never be used as name for anything as it is specific hardware that was dead almost twenty years ago. People calling things AS/400 have no idea what the words that they are using mean.
ok so we have an iSeries operating system, running as a virtual OS and/or "virtual machine", which is being ran on the Power architecture, running on our Power 720 server...
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AIX, Z and i are operating systems, like Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.
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@dave247 said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
@scottalanmiller said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
@dave247 said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
In my case, I have a Power 720, which is obviously a physical system, but I thought it was also referred to as an "i Series" (previously Series i) but also referred to as AS400.
Power 720 is the server name. Power is the architecture. Series i is the name of the operating system. AS/400 hasn't existed since the 1990s and is the name of the hardware that ran OS/400 that turned into i Series. AS/400 should never be used as name for anything as it is specific hardware that was dead almost twenty years ago. People calling things AS/400 have no idea what the words that they are using mean.
ok so we have an iSeries operating system, running as a virtual OS and/or "virtual machine", which is being ran on the Power architecture, running on our Power 720 server...
That would be a correct way to state it.
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Your Power 720 can also run VMs (or LPARs in the physical virtualization world) of a few Linux flavours, or AIX. If you had IBM mainframe hardware, then system Z would be an option for your LPARs as well.
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@scottalanmiller said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
@dave247 said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
So I am trying to compare it to ESXi which is what I'm more familiar with. I have a Dell server with Intel chips and obviously ESXi runs on that as the hypervisor and then ESXi allows me to hosts my virtual machines. So how exactly does a Power system work compared to that?
Power is the architecture. Power 7 or Power 8 would be the specific processor. There is no hypervisor needed in the Power world as it has always had hardware virtualization. Anything on Power is already virtual before you even start installing an OS, so while you can put a software hypervisor on top of Power, it's never necessary for virtualization.
hmm... so can you define "virtual" for me in this case? I don't really get the distinction... or maybe I should look up "hard ware virtualization"?
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@scottalanmiller said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
Your Power 720 can also run VMs (or LPARs in the physical virtualization world) of a few Linux flavours, or AIX. If you had IBM mainframe hardware, then system Z would be an option for your LPARs as well.
ok I do recall reading a bit about this before, so it makes some sense. I think I need to dig deep into some of the history and really get familiar with more terms.
