The difficulty of managing that many IP addresses is trivial if you know what you are doing.
I just hit 35 years in the industry. And I've worked in the market served by AS/400s (and their successors the iSeries and then i5) since before AS/400s were rumored under development.
The above quote touches on one huge point that's often ignored -- most AS/400 sites definitely do not have the ability to manage a single IP address, much less two or more.
AS/400s are designed to work in environments that simply don't have significant system management of any kind. If you know TCP/IP configuration, you might not believe how misconfigured many AS/400s are and still operate (apparently) flawlessly.
This is an area that's too often overlooked. This example illustrates why there can be such a low cost of operation, but it's only a single example. When all such examples are listed, it starts to make sense how such a complex system manages to run for so long with a fraction of an FTE for administration.
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I just hit 35 years in the industry. And I've worked in the market served by AS/400s (and their successors the iSeries and then i5) since before AS/400s were rumored under development.
The above quote touches on one huge point that's often ignored -- most AS/400 sites definitely do not have the ability to manage a single IP address, much less two or more.
AS/400s are designed to work in environments that simply don't have significant system management of any kind. If you know TCP/IP configuration, you might not believe how misconfigured many AS/400s are and still operate (apparently) flawlessly.
This is an area that's too often overlooked. This example illustrates why there can be such a low cost of operation, but it's only a single example. When all such examples are listed, it starts to make sense how such a complex system manages to run for so long with a fraction of an FTE for administration.