Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?
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Wow, AS400.... I thought Guitar Center was way behind the curve still being on AS400 when I worked there in the mid-late 90s...
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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?:
@brandon220 said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
@dave247 Yes. I don't remember the model before that one but it was IBM as well.
720 doesn't make it an i, though. Most 720 are either AIX or Linux.
hmm.. well I've seen many references to iSeries here at work(including in contracts) and various support folks have referred to it as iSeries as well. Is there some specific way I can tell? It is a "green screen" console..
Oh I'm sure that yours is i Series. I was just saying that the volume of 720 deployments doesn't reflect i Series itself, but the hardware in general.
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@rojoloco said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
Wow, AS400.... I thought Guitar Center was way behind the curve still being on AS400 when I worked there in the mid-late 90s...
And it was. AS/400 was definitely already ageing heavily by that point.
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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?:
@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 think you've probably already answered this for the most part, but I wanted to know more why so many places use iSeries systems.
Very, very few do. They are so rare it's considered shocking to find one and those that use them almost universally do so because they are unable or unwilling to update their software and join the modern world. iSeries is a product that exists for legacy focused businesses that are mired in the past.
Well I guess it's all relative, but it seems like there are a lot out there. I literally just had Federal Exam auditors here today and I asked them if they usually see iSeries systems at pretty much every bank with an on-premises banking core. Otherwise, they see Blade servers at bigger companies.
Blade is a form factor that no bank with a clue would ever use. Totally wrong for factor. Series i definitely comes as a blade. Your auditor doesn't know what they are seeing.
I think he probably does know what he's seeing, actually. Maybe some detail has been missed. I'm just repeating what he said, and paraphrasing I guess. I think he was talking about IBM BladeCenter servers, though all I heard was the word "blade". I don't have any other details though.
Just for your reference, IBM BladeCenters are 100% these boxes
IBM only makes one thing, Power, and all Power can run iSeries. So all IBM blades can be i Series, if i OS is installed on them.Today, System i just refers to the OS installed on any IBM server. It used to be special hardware pre-2000, but has been standard Power hardware since the AS/400 models were dropped at the end of 1999.
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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.
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@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.
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@rojoloco said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
Wow, AS400.... I thought Guitar Center was way behind the curve still being on AS400 when I worked there in the mid-late 90s...
I worked at Walgreens for the last 10+ years and the stores I worked at had them as well. Certainly felt like old, archaic 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.
