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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]

#41

Post by traceroute66 »

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.

> but “rock solid” might as well be an urban legend.

I can indeed confirm that "rock solid" is an urban legend. I swore I'd never have anything to do with the AS/400 or IBM after a certain incident.

I need to be careful what I say, but basically there was a certain fault with a certain chip on a certain board.

The so-called IBM technicians we called out ultimately proved to be completely incompetent. Our engineers were collecting hard-facts data on the fault(s) we were seeing. But the IBM guys could never find the problem.

In the end, because IBM engineer after IBM engineer continued to sign-off the machine, we had little choice but to allow it to continue in production albeit with close monitoring.

In the end, it ended up with an almighty climax event. Let's just say its the first (and hopefully only) time I've witnessed an IT company's Professional Indemnity insurance being used in anger to pay for recovery (and indeed why if you are involved with the management of an IT company you should ensure such insurance is in place).

TL;DR The client's AS/400 was thrown onto the scrap heap as soon as humanly possible after an all-hands-on-deck accelerated migration away took place.

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

#42

Post by ThinkBeat »

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.

My sample is of a couple of hundred AS/400 machines. This was prior to the rebranding to iSeries

They were used for accounting, logistics, and point of sales systems at different companies.

Common for nearly all was that they lacked any IT department or even a sole tech geek.

Nothing is perfect. it makes sense there might be some lemons around but from my experience they were the most reliable platform I have ever been in contact with.

in different companies used mostly for accounting, logistics, and some POS systems that were entirely lacking any IT department or even the odd tech geek.

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

#43

Post by bluedino »

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 were not sexy, they didnt have games (actually a couple)

I'm not aware of a Doom port, but there are some console-based games that would be put to shame by a ZX81

http://www.jcrcmds.com/jcrgames2.html

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

#44

Post by bluedino »

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.

Zend provides PHP that runs on the i, so you should be able to get pretty much any information you want out of and exchange information with SOAP or build an API just like you would on Linux

https://www.zend.com/products/zend-server/ibmi

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

#45

Post by bluedino »

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.

> They are so slow, though.

I guess that depends?

I used to go to an AS/400 ERP software conference every year. The number of users dwindled and each year was a game of "Who's missing this year..."

Rightfully, everyone was going to SaaS products or Windows-based systems.

One year, I didn't see a group that was usually there (they were missed as always bought tons of company swag to give away). Emailed the CTO after the conference to ask what was up, and they were 75% complete switching over to one of the big-name, Windows-based on-prem ERP systems.

They bought the software, 4/5 Windows licenses for SQL, IIS, backup server, etc. The next year they were back at the conference! They could never get the new software to process their daily shipping fast enough for it to work.

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

#46

Post by aerostable_slug »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #42
sedatk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My sample is of a couple of hundred AS/400 machines. This was prior to the rebranding to iSeries They were used for accounting, logistics, and point of sales systems at different companies. Common for nearly all was that they lacked any IT department or even a sole tech geek. Nothing is perfect. it makes sense there might be some lemons around but from my experience they were the most reliable platform I have ever be…

>in different companies used mostly for accounting, logistics, and some POS systems that were entirely lacking any IT department or even the odd tech geek.

I saw this as well, at least in a way. As a contractor a few weeks out of college, I worked at a regional telco provider that had an AS/400 used for accounting etc. While a reasonably tech-ey firm (they were an ISP as well as providing pager service, frame relay, and other fun relics of a another era), nobody really knew how the AS/400 worked so they were a little wary of letting the new guy use it. It hadn't ever gone down to anyone's recollection, but they were pretty sure that with the staff they had they wouldn't know how to quickly bring it back up if things went pear-shaped.

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

#47

Post by steveklabnik »

nikau wrote: post #35
jgalt212 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but if their secret sauce produces a much better product, I'm not terribly concerned that the value-add is a software-based and not hardware-based.

Yeah I'm not arguing for or against their product, just genuinely curious to know what differentiates them from existing blade servers hosting kubernetes or something.

I wrote about this a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324

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

#48

Post by steveklabnik »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #37
unixhero wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not. I listened to their podcast and got my information from there, straight from Cantrill.

It just doesn't seem to offer much, for all the grandiose claims. Who is going to pay a premium to have "reimagined" firmware and ROMs? Or yet another proprietary hypervisor? Or a stack that seems to be built around Solaris? It looks like a vanity or nostalgia project started by old Solaris folk, as far as I've seen.

Here is a recent thread where someone asks the same questions, and gets a bunch of answers from various people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32039943

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

#49

Post by steveklabnik »

mikedelago wrote: post #24
nikau wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Expect more details in the future. Right now we're focused on building the product.

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

#50

Post by steveklabnik »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #38
zozbot234 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" th…

Hyperscalers do their own boards, chassis, BMCs, racks, etc., and can do their firmware (or modifications to it) though. Several are even getting into their own CPU designs. They don't want any boutique designs controlled by other companies there. And they don't want to pay premiums for it. They certainly don't want to run a proprietary hypervisor / host OS stack on it.

You're assuming hyperscalars would be our target buyer. That's not the case; in fact, it's almost backwards. Hyperscalars build these things for themselves, but do not sell them to others. There are other organizations that could take advantage of this technology, but literally cannot buy it. That's where Oxide fits in.
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