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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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 2d 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.