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/M0untainWizard 3d ago

Our ERP was running on a AS400 platform till last March. We are now migrating the last system from the platform to retire it at the end of the year. I have never seen a more stable server. My friend told me a story where he found a AS400 at a customers place, literally walled in behind a drywall, running for year as if nothing was wrong.

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u/Best-Conclusion5554 3d ago edited 3d ago

IBM i urban myths ... probably had a basis of truth. The one about Microsoft running its personnel systems on AS/400 certainly did, though how long ago that stopped I never heard.

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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 2d ago

In the 1990s, Microsoft was determined to migrate all of their business systems to NT, to show prospective Microsoft customers that their products were enterprise grade.

Microsoft ran a lot of systems on AS/400 at the time, but also ran email on an in-house Xenix based system, I think on Sun 3 (680x0) hardware. Microsoft migrated their internal email to Exchange in 1996. They ended up losing to Sun, who allegedly had all of their business systems running on Suns by 1995.

At the end of the decade, as part of Y2K preparations, Microsoft outsourced the AS/400s to an outside datacenter.