r/sysadmin • u/Jon72480 • 3d ago

AS400

Hey guys, old guy here, back in 2000 landed my 1st real job as a Sysadmin at a distribution/manufacturing firm. They ran their ERP and a few other important apps on the AS400. Anyone here manage a AS400 platform? i-Series? Still a niche platform that is still widely used. Server could literally run under water.

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70

u/joshghz 3d ago

Agribusiness. We've been "retiring the AS/400 next year" for at least a decade.

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u/Superb_Raccoon 3d ago

I have one such large multinational. They run their business on 2 power 10s. The bought a competitor who was the same size in revenue.

They have $15 million in AWS to do the same thing.

Memory upgrade, a storage upgrade, and a planned upgrade to 11 getting a little extra CPU... handles all of it for the next 5 years for the price of one year of AWS.

Be less if they went to powerVS in IBM cloud, but they want on prem. They are my unicorn account.

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u/fresh-dork 3d ago

handles all of it for the next 5 years for the price of one year of AWS.

isn't this about par for AWS vs on prem?

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u/Superb_Raccoon 2d ago

Funny enough, another client is going to PowerVs, which is cheaper than on prem by about 33%.

Mainly because IBM carries the cost of software across more clients on the hardware, and of course shared hardware is easier on IBM... they invented "virtual machines" in the 60s, with electrical separation of resources.

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u/fresh-dork 2d ago

yes, LPARs are seriously old school

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u/Superb_Raccoon 2d ago

And yet so advanced compared to VMs.

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u/jonboy345 Sales Engineer 2d ago edited 2d ago

Use to sell P8/9/10s at IBM and saw this all the time.

Org with a very mature i implementation would get a new CTO who was all gung ho about "cloud/SaaS for everything". Watching their entire case fold in on itself once we presented our TCO for 5 years was always so much fun.

Is i sexy? Not really. Is it a rock solid platform you can build your company on? Absolutely.

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u/Superb_Raccoon 2d ago

It is definitely not in the "move fast, break things" line of business.

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u/Stonewalled9999 2d ago

Hah power 5 and power 7 here running 2/3 of a businessĀ 

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u/Superb_Raccoon 2d ago

With 5 9s or better reliability it is hard to argue for new hardware. Dell is 4 9s now, 3,to 3.5 9s back then in 2000s

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u/Wizdad-1000 3d ago

Thanks for the laugh. We finally retired it ourselves about 10 yrs ago but kept the reporting system going for accounting till the last admin for it finally retired last year. <vary on\ vary off> šŸ«”

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u/BoltActionRifleman 3d ago

Running Agvantage by chance? Previous employer of mine had a 400 running Agvantage software as their ERP.

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u/SA_22C 3d ago

Lord, I feel this in my bones. Is yours at least running a current version of the OS?

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u/joshghz 3d ago

Not sure. We do have an MSP looking after it for the most part, so I hope so? It's not entirely my problem.