8 ms·

The AS/400 was the most reliable server I have ever worked with. They tended to just work month after month. I am not saying it is the most reliable server in

The AS/400 was the most reliable server I have ever worked with. They tended to just work month after month. I am not saying it is the most reliable server in the world, because there are a lot I have not worked with, but it was far more reliable than anything else I have worked on. IF something did go wrong, they would at times call IBM and ask for service before the customer had any knowledge of an issue. My mother became the AS/400 sys admin at her company and she had no idea about servers or technical sides of computers. She changed the backup tapes on a schedule and that was it . Many places nobody knew where the box was since nobody interacted with it on a physical level. Green screen terminals or terminal apps on Windows was the norm. Some business had them for inventory / sales / accounting and so on. Many places nobody knew where the box was since nobody interacted with it on a physical level. Green screen terminals or terminal apps on Windows was the norm. There were a couple of simple games (not from IBM) you could download and play, but it wasn't worth it. There were some drawbacks, but Id love to have one to play with.

chasil 3y ago
The modern "i" series machines are just POWER processors on a standard server. It's unlikely that anything under a 14nm process node is used for the CPU, if that. IBM has deep knowledge in high-availability systems, but it's unlikely that you could call these more advanced than a modern 5nm Ryzen server.
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  You don't understand where AS-400 real power comes from. DB integrated directly into filesystem, you optimize your work for how the whole system has been designed and get massive benefits and robustness. Performance between junior basic code and heavily optimized complex queries even on just Oracle can be 1000x easily, just ask any data warehouse guy (seen it few times myself even though I don't do warehouses). You can maybe add another 0 for AS-400 there in extreme cases. Yes if you end up doing things wrong and expect that CPU to do some heavy math then yes this will be dusted quickly. Otherwise, not so much. But this goes against most modern 'SV principles' so I don't expect much love from younger generations here. Business love that though, and secretly wish all IT could be as reliable and predictable as them although that ship has sailed long time ago. One of those 'they don't do them like good old times anymore'.
  - chasil 3y ago
    I am very aware that an instance of db2 is deeply embedded into the OS, which is designed to be easily maintained. I deal with one regularly at another corporate site. You might also find it interesting to consider that the CPU was likely made by Global Foundries (assuming that their arrangement with IBM is still in place). I am still trying to get my coworkers excited about VMS on x86; our VAX users are completely disinterested.
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      You have VAX users?
      - chasil 3y ago
        VMS 7.3.
        cbm-vic-20 3y ago
        Are they still actually running on VAX, or something more "modern" like Alpha?
        chasil 3y ago
        We are using the Charon VAX emulator on an HPE Xeon. I have my own skunkworks VMS 1.0 on SimH, from these instructions: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Installing_VMS_V1.0_on_SIMH https://gunkies.org/wiki/Installing_VMS_V1.0_on_SIMH
        sgt 3y ago
        Who is using VMS in 2024? Use case?
        chasil 3y ago
        An enormous set of COBOL applications using TDMS.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  POWER 10 is on 7nm. It also has a ton of RAS features.[0] ECC beyond SECDED, processor instruction retry, CRC on all fabrics part of which can fail and the system will degrade to half-bandwidth. Hot/Swap and/or Redudant everything to include the LCD panel on the OP Panel. I'm actually curious what type of RAS stuff EPYC and XEON have, and hope somebody can link to the info. [0] https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/2RJYYJML https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/2RJYYJML
  - chasil 3y ago
    I will admit it, that is impressive.
senectus1 3y ago
totally agree, we had one at the minesite I was admin at. Ran JD.Edwards ERP on it. was rock. solid. in a time when NT4 was king. Also had a Domino mail server (for lotus notes. It was way ahead of its time (at the time) and also super rock solid. Neither ever gave me any trouble... even when the Domino server ran out of disk space.. it never died or corrupted. just let me know and when i fixed it it carried on like there was no issue.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
elorant 3y ago
It surely worked, but when it didn’t it took ages to resolve the issue. I remember back in mid nineties, IBM had brought a whole team to troubleshoot an issue and they stayed at the company where I worked for almost a week to find out what went wrong.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Pamar 3y ago
  Well, exactly the same thing happened in a project I worked on in mid-2000s. Except it was not AS400 or anything hardware... it was a problem with an Oracle product, and took a bit over one week with higher and higher gurus being parachuted in by Oracle Europe. And in the early 90s I had another similar episode, this time with DEC/Vax. Not sure anymore but I think they finally had to patch the OS. My point: nothing made by humans can guarantee 101% uptime. The main difference is how far any vendor will go to solve your problems.
  - kragen 3y ago
    i would say, rather, that the main difference is how dependent you are on the goodwill of the vendor to solve your problems, and how much you can solve yourself (or by hiring people). which is why oracle has been mostly replaced with postgres, mysql, and sqlite; why as/400 has been mostly replaced with web servers running apache and nginx; why vaxen and the like have been mostly replaced with i386 and later amd64 hardware with buses like pci and pcie; and why vax/vms has been replaced by linux when you have business-critical systems problems only your systems vendor can solve, over time, their pricing strategy tends to converge on the following: 1. how much money does your company make? 2. hand it over. you may not know as much about linux as the gurus dec parachuted in to patch your vms installation knew about vms, but i can guarantee that you care more about your own problems than dec did, and that counts for more. you can either learn what you need to know or, if you have more money than time, hire somebody who already knows it—at a market rate, not a monopoly-rents rate. the perverse incentives enjoyed by vendors of closed systems slowly but surely destroyed almost all of them, leaving only a few standing
HankB99 3y ago
> There were some drawbacks, but Id love to have one to play with. One of the shops I worked at had an AS/400 and related equipment sitting on a pallet by the elevator bank. I could have had it for free. Drawbacks? I had no way to transport a pallet of computer equipment. And IIRC it required 3 phase power so care and feeding would have been well beyond my means. (But I still have and occasionally use the IBM Model M that they were going to discard and another time I carried a retired Sun pizza box home on the train.)
bongodongobob 3y ago
As someone who works heavily in infra, months of uptime is absolutely the norm. If you find yourself having to reboot servers or they are crashing, you're doing something wrong.
- Suppafly 3y ago
  ...or they are microsoft servers and you have to reboot them once a month to apply security updates still for some reason.
randrus 3y ago
In the 90s I worked across the aisle from our AS/400 dev - after an office power outage we’d spend hours running fsck on our unixen and he’d take a long lunch. Every time.
safeimp 3y ago
> IF something did go wrong, they would at times call IBM and ask for service before the customer had any knowledge of an issue. I always assumed their call home service was triggered by SNMP but may be wrong? Regardless, IBM exposed a lot of metrics via SNMP so it was always an easy way to query it for metrics and/or accept traps from their devices/OS’s for failures
tyingq 3y ago
Some of that reliability is just the homogeneous software ecosystem. Where most applications developed for the AS/400 are using roughly the same stack for "app server", "database", and so on. That closed ecosystem means core bugs get ironed out via customer feedback pretty quickly. There's a limited amount of unique combinations of software parts and config.

chasil 3y ago

The modern "i" series machines are just POWER processors on a standard server. It's unlikely that anything under a 14nm process node is used for the CPU, if that. IBM has deep knowledge in high-availability systems, but it's unlikely that you could call these more advanced than a modern 5nm Ryzen server.

saiya-jin 3y ago
You don't understand where AS-400 real power comes from. DB integrated directly into filesystem, you optimize your work for how the whole system has been designed and get massive benefits and robustness. Performance between junior basic code and heavily optimized complex queries even on just Oracle can be 1000x easily, just ask any data warehouse guy (seen it few times myself even though I don't do warehouses). You can maybe add another 0 for AS-400 there in extreme cases. Yes if you end up doing things wrong and expect that CPU to do some heavy math then yes this will be dusted quickly. Otherwise, not so much. But this goes against most modern 'SV principles' so I don't expect much love from younger generations here. Business love that though, and secretly wish all IT could be as reliable and predictable as them although that ship has sailed long time ago. One of those 'they don't do them like good old times anymore'.
- chasil 3y ago
  I am very aware that an instance of db2 is deeply embedded into the OS, which is designed to be easily maintained. I deal with one regularly at another corporate site. You might also find it interesting to consider that the CPU was likely made by Global Foundries (assuming that their arrangement with IBM is still in place). I am still trying to get my coworkers excited about VMS on x86; our VAX users are completely disinterested.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    You have VAX users?
    - chasil 3y ago
      VMS 7.3.
      - cbm-vic-20 3y ago
        Are they still actually running on VAX, or something more "modern" like Alpha?
        chasil 3y ago
        We are using the Charon VAX emulator on an HPE Xeon. I have my own skunkworks VMS 1.0 on SimH, from these instructions: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Installing_VMS_V1.0_on_SIMH https://gunkies.org/wiki/Installing_VMS_V1.0_on_SIMH
      - sgt 3y ago
        Who is using VMS in 2024? Use case?
        chasil 3y ago
        An enormous set of COBOL applications using TDMS.
sillywalk 3y ago
POWER 10 is on 7nm. It also has a ton of RAS features.[0] ECC beyond SECDED, processor instruction retry, CRC on all fabrics part of which can fail and the system will degrade to half-bandwidth. Hot/Swap and/or Redudant everything to include the LCD panel on the OP Panel. I'm actually curious what type of RAS stuff EPYC and XEON have, and hope somebody can link to the info. [0] https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/2RJYYJML https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/2RJYYJML
- chasil 3y ago
  I will admit it, that is impressive.

senectus1 3y ago

totally agree, we had one at the minesite I was admin at. Ran JD.Edwards ERP on it. was rock. solid. in a time when NT4 was king. Also had a Domino mail server (for lotus notes. It was way ahead of its time (at the time) and also super rock solid. Neither ever gave me any trouble... even when the Domino server ran out of disk space.. it never died or corrupted. just let me know and when i fixed it it carried on like there was no issue.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

elorant 3y ago

It surely worked, but when it didn’t it took ages to resolve the issue. I remember back in mid nineties, IBM had brought a whole team to troubleshoot an issue and they stayed at the company where I worked for almost a week to find out what went wrong.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Pamar 3y ago
Well, exactly the same thing happened in a project I worked on in mid-2000s. Except it was not AS400 or anything hardware... it was a problem with an Oracle product, and took a bit over one week with higher and higher gurus being parachuted in by Oracle Europe. And in the early 90s I had another similar episode, this time with DEC/Vax. Not sure anymore but I think they finally had to patch the OS. My point: nothing made by humans can guarantee 101% uptime. The main difference is how far any vendor will go to solve your problems.
- kragen 3y ago
  i would say, rather, that the main difference is how dependent you are on the goodwill of the vendor to solve your problems, and how much you can solve yourself (or by hiring people). which is why oracle has been mostly replaced with postgres, mysql, and sqlite; why as/400 has been mostly replaced with web servers running apache and nginx; why vaxen and the like have been mostly replaced with i386 and later amd64 hardware with buses like pci and pcie; and why vax/vms has been replaced by linux when you have business-critical systems problems only your systems vendor can solve, over time, their pricing strategy tends to converge on the following: 1. how much money does your company make? 2. hand it over. you may not know as much about linux as the gurus dec parachuted in to patch your vms installation knew about vms, but i can guarantee that you care more about your own problems than dec did, and that counts for more. you can either learn what you need to know or, if you have more money than time, hire somebody who already knows it—at a market rate, not a monopoly-rents rate. the perverse incentives enjoyed by vendors of closed systems slowly but surely destroyed almost all of them, leaving only a few standing

HankB99 3y ago

> There were some drawbacks, but Id love to have one to play with. One of the shops I worked at had an AS/400 and related equipment sitting on a pallet by the elevator bank. I could have had it for free. Drawbacks? I had no way to transport a pallet of computer equipment. And IIRC it required 3 phase power so care and feeding would have been well beyond my means. (But I still have and occasionally use the IBM Model M that they were going to discard and another time I carried a retired Sun pizza box home on the train.)

bongodongobob 3y ago

As someone who works heavily in infra, months of uptime is absolutely the norm. If you find yourself having to reboot servers or they are crashing, you're doing something wrong.

Suppafly 3y ago
...or they are microsoft servers and you have to reboot them once a month to apply security updates still for some reason.

randrus 3y ago

In the 90s I worked across the aisle from our AS/400 dev - after an office power outage we’d spend hours running fsck on our unixen and he’d take a long lunch. Every time.

safeimp 3y ago

> IF something did go wrong, they would at times call IBM and ask for service before the customer had any knowledge of an issue. I always assumed their call home service was triggered by SNMP but may be wrong? Regardless, IBM exposed a lot of metrics via SNMP so it was always an easy way to query it for metrics and/or accept traps from their devices/OS’s for failures

tyingq 3y ago

Some of that reliability is just the homogeneous software ecosystem. Where most applications developed for the AS/400 are using roughly the same stack for "app server", "database", and so on. That closed ecosystem means core bugs get ironed out via customer feedback pretty quickly. There's a limited amount of unique combinations of software parts and config.