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Inside an IBM AS/400 eSeries Factory [video]

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Re: Inside an IBM AS/400 eSeries Factory [video]

#21

Post by protomyth »

bluepizza wrote: post #11
ThinkBeat wrote: post #9

These machines were amazing. Rock solid. Never crashed, never need someone to reboot it and if something went wrong it would call IBM and say it needed service and what components were impacted (if it knew). In some companies these things were in a closet, under piles of other things and everyone had forgotten about its existence. Then comes the IBM rep to fix it and there is confusion about its existence. The operat…

They are so slow, though. DB2 and API performances are atrocious. This is a machine designed to run batch jobs, and nothing else.

I haven't seen that its slow, except when the RAID battery is off. Generally the IBM rep shows up when that happens.

Re: Inside an IBM AS/400 eSeries Factory [video]

#22

Post by throwawaylinux »

unixhero wrote: post #12
nikau wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting to read some of the hype around 0xide, it seems like its just some software ontop of a blade system?

No dude. They are reimagining the firmware and ROMs on the mother board, and so on. I recommend looking further into it.

This is sarcasm, right?

Re: Inside an IBM AS/400 eSeries Factory [video]

#23

Post by wil421 »

nkg wrote: post #18

This thing is still operating the ERP of many brick and mortar french businesses. A few software companies have the guys able to maintain it, so they are well off, charging big bucks for every maintenance operation. As a developer I have been asked a few times to build websites that feed on flat files exported from AS400 (don't bother asking about APIs). It was a pain every single time.

Ouch, you brought up nightmares about flat files from a previous job. I’m betting it was an AS400 or something similar providing the data I needed to ingest. It was painful.

Re: Inside an IBM AS/400 eSeries Factory [video]

#24

Post by mikedelago »

nikau wrote: post #13
unixhero wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No dude. They are reimagining the firmware and ROMs on the mother board, and so on. I recommend looking further into it.

I did have a read of their website, but it reads a bit like a kickstarter campaign with lots of vague statements and no details. At this stage I'm unsure what benefits it has over a blade server managed by traditional api like snmp.

This was my take as well; bold claims with minimal details or demos on their website.

Re: Inside an IBM AS/400 eSeries Factory [video]

#26

Post by a-dub »

wil421 wrote: post #23
nkg wrote: post #18

This thing is still operating the ERP of many brick and mortar french businesses. A few software companies have the guys able to maintain it, so they are well off, charging big bucks for every maintenance operation. As a developer I have been asked a few times to build websites that feed on flat files exported from AS400 (don't bother asking about APIs). It was a pain every single time.

Ouch, you brought up nightmares about flat files from a previous job. I’m betting it was an AS400 or something similar providing the data I needed to ingest. It was painful.

file drop apis weren't so bad. drop a file in the input directory with a unique name, wait for the response to appear in the output directory. with samba these became easy to work with.

i wrapped a couple of these with soap webservices back in the day and any reliability issues almost always came from the soap server.

ups used to be a gigantic as/400 shop... i wonder if they're still using them...

Re: Inside an IBM AS/400 eSeries Factory [video]

#27

Post by tablespoon »

One of the comments on the video:

> Randy Schnier

> 8 hours ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m53H0pO2FD4&lc=Ugzs2gCWlsh1_...)

> I worked at this IBM site as an engineer for almost 30 years, leaving in 2012. Several divisions were based there besides AS/400, including IBM Software Group that was responsible for the WebSphere Application Server family of products. As the video mentions, at its peak around the year 2000, the site had about 8,000 employees. It is now down to significantly less than 1,000 and most of the site is leased out to other companies for office and warehouse space. Actually IBM sold the site several years ago to an external real estate firm and leases back the space they currently use! You might notice in the video that the AS/400 cabinets were rounded at the rear -- this was to prevent customers from pushing the unit right up against a wall and blocking the cooling vents.

Re: Inside an IBM AS/400 eSeries Factory [video]

#29

Post by flomo »

sedatk wrote: post #16
ThinkBeat wrote: post #9

These machines were amazing. Rock solid. Never crashed, never need someone to reboot it and if something went wrong it would call IBM and say it needed service and what components were impacted (if it knew). In some companies these things were in a closet, under piles of other things and everyone had forgotten about its existence. Then comes the IBM rep to fix it and there is confusion about its existence. The operat…

I worked at a company for 3 months in 1998 and the AS/400 there crashed once. It required IBM personnel to come and fix it. So, I like the narrow scope of the machine and certain concepts in the OS, but “rock solid” might as well be an urban legend.

Probably around the same time, we had a client where IBM convinced them to install Lotus Notes/Domino on their iSeries, which ran their factory assembly line. This caused extended downtime and cost them tons of money. IIRC they ultimately installed a Pentium II board into the iSeries running NT and ran Lotus off that... silly

Re: Inside an IBM AS/400 eSeries Factory [video]

#30

Post by zozbot234 »

nikau wrote: post #5
1MachineElf wrote: post #3

I wonder if this is how Oxide Computer is building their systems in 2022.

Interesting to read some of the hype around 0xide, it seems like its just some software ontop of a blade system?

Not a blade. They're selling whole racks because that's the level that the hyperscalers work at, and Oxide are trying to bring the same class of systems to on-prem deployments. The closest comparison would be to something like modern mainframes, though the provided featureset might be subtly different. (For one thing, Oxide systems are ordinary x86 systems at the CPU architecture level; it's just "everything else" that's potentially custom.)
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