Another reason I like AS/400s

[Fushigi]

Go here: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/29/033251&tid=137&tid=4 and then search for "AS/400":

The only thing to try is to shoot it.

I worked in the US with a large manufacturing client. They had a large group of AS/400s running their ERPs. One night the security guard was drunk on duty and decided, we do not know why, to take out his anger on an AS/400. It was shot twice, front to back. This took out one processor board and an external connection that provided one of two connections to the storage.

In the morning two things happened

1) Security Guard was arrested

2) IBM turned up to put in a new processor board and external connection.

Total downtime : ZERO.

A fault tolerant power supply is nothing, AS/400s really are bullet proof.

BTW, at work I'm very close to upgrading both of our systems to the new POWER5 based boxes. I just have to get the funding approved.

 

[Buck]

I have never had the chance to work with AS/400s, but from what I've heard in the past, they are pretty good workhorses.

 

[sechs]

You pay more, but, then again, you get more.

 

[Fushigi]

Yep, you do pay more. The UPGRADE I'm pricing out has a discounted price just shy of $600K for one of our systems. But then that includes 3.2TB of 15K RPM SCSI goodness (51 70GB disks in RAID5). And the new disk controllers have 1GB read cache & 757MB write cache. 4 of those will be used: 1 with 6 drives & the rest with 15 drives. 1 RAID set per card.

Someone on a midrange mailing list went from 42 old 10K SCSI drives on an older controller to 7 of the new drives on a new controller and saw disk throughput improve by 30-200% depending on function. I'm going from 62 to 51 drives and pretty much the same old controllers to the new ones; my aggregate disk performance should skyrocket.

I may even be able to run ATTO or another benchmark against it as I will have a couple of these to play with.

 

[mubs]

Grrrrrrrrrr. But, but, but that's a Xeon-based system???

 

[Buck]

Grrrrrrrrrr. But, but, but that's a Xeon-based system???

We all have our flaws. What what about the Power5 based boxes?

 

[Fushigi]

Grrrrrrrrrr. But, but, but that's a Xeon-based system???

Well, some people insist on 32 bits instead of 64. So if they need Windows or x86 Linux, we wrap it up inside the iSeries and make it fairly resilient. OS/400 controls it. It has it's own CPU & RAM so it doesn't drag iSeries performance. It shares tape & CD/DVD resources and OS/400 manages the disk space. Basically I'll carve out so many gigs for the Windows server; that space will be spread across all available drives; and Windows will see it as C:. I can grow/shrink the size or add more until Windows runs out of drive letters. Max / server is 1TB right now.

Oh, a PentiumM-based card will be out shortly to reduce the amount of heat generated in the chassis. Those Xeons run awfully hot.

For a business, it has several advantages: easier backup/restore, no additional footprint/rack space, no hardware maintenance costs (in an iSeries, all cards in the chassis are covered by the chassis' maintenance), VLAN over PCI-X for communications between other cards or the iSeries - great for a Windows front end to an iSeries database. The machine I'm specing out will hold about 10 of the Xeon cards, although I only need 2 to start.

Buck - Flaws in Power5? None that I've heard of so far beyond the expense of the chip.

 

[mubs]

Gosh, Fushigi, the AS/400 platform never ceases to amaze me. The S/36 was a dog, and I believe the early AS/400s were too, but the ugly duckling seems to have blossomed into the proverbial Prince Charming. Kudos to you for being able to work with such fine equipment!

 

[Tea]

And the Pentium M will whip the Xeon. Those little things rock!

 

[Fushigi]

And the Pentium M will whip the Xeon. Those little things rock!

Really? That's good to see as I was wondering how the performance would be.

Gosh, Fushigi, the AS/400 platform never ceases to amaze me. The S/36 was a dog, and I believe the early AS/400s were too, but the ugly duckling seems to have blossomed into the proverbial Prince Charming. Kudos to you for being able to work with such fine equipment!

Every iteration of the hardware, especially since they went RISC, has been a big step forward. Power5 is probably the biggest yet. Not only in terms of raw performance but the functionality they keep adding. Price/performance ratio gets better by 40-70% with each new generation as well. To buy the machine I'm specing now would easily have been $3+ million in 2001 and it would have been much larger and more expensive to maintain.

And the OS improvements are coming even faster. I can't even rattle of the changes in the past few releases. Again, most of the major improvements have been since the RISC conversion. I think that really provided the computing engine that enabled Rochester (MN) to pack a lot more functionailty in the OS.

The RISC conversion, BTW, was in 1995. The 400 has been a 64 bit machine for 9 years. Pre-RISC code was dynamically converted to optimized RISC code by the OS prior to first-time execution. The converted object was stored and used going forward. That's how they managed to go from a 40 bit CISC offshoot of the 370 processor to 64 bit RISC Power platform while preserving application compatability.

I did a few S/36 to AS/400 conversions at a former employer. Would you believe there are still thousands of 36s that are still running today? Some are over 20 years old and are still humming along.

S/36 and early AS/400 performance wasn't that spectacular, but the systems were still easier to manage and less expensive than the next best thing - a mainframe.

BTW, modern iSeries machines can still run S/36 code. So an old RPG II program from 1978 will -- most likely -- run just fine on a 16-way Power5 machine. Just waaaaaaaaay faster. 8)

I tell you, IBM has the best R&D minds in the business. IBM as a company may do wierd things, but their R&D is still tops.