Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?
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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.
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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?:
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"?
There's no "case", virtual is always the same. It's a logical computer, rather than a physical one.
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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?:
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.
The terms are all the same in the PC world, too. We just rarely use them because people get so used to all the machines that they touch being PCs that they start to make broad assumptions based on that.
It's only a recent quirk of the market that has allowed this to happen. Even just ten years ago systems like Power, Sparc, Itanium (IA64), MIPS, Alpha, etc. were so popular that you could not make the PC assumption at all. But for a brief moment, the AMD64 processor family became so dominant that many people started to think that it was all that there was. But now that ARM has hit in force, that assumption can't exist again.
Think about a Raspberry Pi. It's a RISC system like Power or Sparc, but not as powerful or expensive. Using one breaks all the assumptions that the AMD64 PC world normally builds up.
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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?:
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.
The terms are all the same in the PC world, too. We just rarely use them because people get so used to all the machines that they touch being PCs that they start to make broad assumptions based on that.
It's only a recent quirk of the market that has allowed this to happen. Even just ten years ago systems like Power, Sparc, Itanium (IA64), MIPS, Alpha, etc. were so popular that you could not make the PC assumption at all. But for a brief moment, the AMD64 processor family became so dominant that many people started to think that it was all that there was. But now that ARM has hit in force, that assumption can't exist again.
Think about a Raspberry Pi. It's a RISC system like Power or Sparc, but not as powerful or expensive. Using one breaks all the assumptions that the AMD64 PC world normally builds up.
ugh.. I know jack shit about any of this.
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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.
Unless you're like me talking about a 20+ year old piece of gear - yes my client has a still in use AS/400 running OS400, hell, I can't believe I'm managed to get a piece of iSeries software old enough to support their box, yet new enough to run on Windows 10.
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Hardware virtualization is how all virtualization had to be done until recently. Virtualization takes a lot of processor power to do so if it was not handled in hardware, it was not able to be done. So until recently, all big servers had their "hypervisors" as part of the processors.
Intel didn't do this with IA32 because it was so cheap and slow. But then AMD64 came along and had way more power. But before that had virtualization, some vendors like Xen and VMware managed to do virtualization completely in software to mimic how the hardware did it on other platforms. But then AMD64 got partial hardware virtualization support (or assistance) and now everyone except Xen depends on that processor support. So even in the AMD64 world today, the processor has to do most of the heavy lifting. But you need a software hypervisor to control it.
