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?:
@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.
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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.
So I'm not really running AS400 at all... I'm running iSeries. I will need to make sure I remember that and try to correct everyone I work with who calls it that... lol
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@dashrender 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.
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.
In theory it could be as young as 19 years old
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@dave247 said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
So I'm not really running AS400 at all... I'm running iSeries.
Correct. The two never overlap. AS/400 hardware is so ridiculously ancient and slow. You'd not be able to do anything useful with it. It would be a fraction of the power of a Raspberry Pi but sucking a grand of electricity every month. It wouldn't be 1/10th the power of your phone. The last AS/400 was Power 3, which was the equivalent to a low end old school PowerPC Macintosh desktop that was silly ~12 years ago.
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@scottalanmiller said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
@dashrender 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.
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.
In theory it could be as young as 19 years old
could be, but I'm pretty sure it's not.
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@dave247 said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
I will need to make sure I remember that and try to correct everyone I work with who calls it that... lol
They'll just be confused. If they are calling it that, they are pretty lost and are just repeating things they've heard and have no idea what it really is. Most people don't know the first thing about them and call them that. Avoid those people
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bend your mind and talk about system 36.
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@dashrender 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?:
@dashrender 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.
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.
In theory it could be as young as 19 years old
could be, but I'm pretty sure it's not.
It was pretty crazy to be investing in AS/400 by the late 1990s. Even in 1995 is was feeling like a legacy system that was laughable to be deploying new. It was not very impressive from the beginning in the 1980s.
Technically, if you REALLY want to get into it...
AS/400 was replaced by iSeries, which was replaced by System i, which was replaced by Power Systems. But after AS/400, people mostly just call it "i" that know what it is.
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@dashrender said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
bend your mind and talk about system 36.
System/36 is only five years older than AS/400 in first released and both retired together in 2000.
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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?:
I will need to make sure I remember that and try to correct everyone I work with who calls it that... lol
They'll just be confused. If they are calling it that, they are pretty lost and are just repeating things they've heard and have no idea what it really is. Most people don't know the first thing about them and call them that. Avoid those people
mmm yeah well that is the lady who's in charge of the main application for which the iSeries is the back-end of. She does not know anything and calls it AS400 on the reg.
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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?:
I will need to make sure I remember that and try to correct everyone I work with who calls it that... lol
They'll just be confused. If they are calling it that, they are pretty lost and are just repeating things they've heard and have no idea what it really is. Most people don't know the first thing about them and call them that. Avoid those people
mmm yeah well that is the lady who's in charge of the main application for which the iSeries is the back-end of. She does not know anything and calls it AS400 on the reg.
Well... yes, the people who know nothing always call it AS/400
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@scottalanmiller said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
@dashrender said in Disaster Recovery as a service companies that support IBM iSeries / AS400 systems?:
bend your mind and talk about system 36.
System/36 is only five years older than AS/400 in first released and both retired together in 2000.
AS/400 was the continuation of System/38 from the 1970s.
