Wow, I really bunged that formatting up. Let's try that again:
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Cougar,
Last year I took a position with an IBM VAR. I spent the next two months acclimating myself to our client base which spans four states, includes mom-and-pop shops and Fortune 100 shops, and multiple state and federal government clients. We are a Microsoft Gold partner, an IBM Premier Business partner, partnered with SuSE, Sun, Oracle, and a cornucopia of other industry heavyweights. Nothing surprised me in this job more than the number of AS/400 machines in regular daily use by our customers. For simplicity, I will refer to iSeries and i5 machines as AS/400s.
Experience 1: I have one customer that bought a pair of smallish 400s in '97. This client drafted a goal of migrating some custom and ISV code to "something else" because the platform was non-strategic in 2000. Since then, the machines have failed but once, due to an exhaustion of disk space. This was a controlled failure in a sense because the machine was still functional. It apparently went into a "maintenance required" state and paused the applications. 20 minutes later, they were back on the air. This client has had more hardware failures on their pair of s/390s than on the as/400s. They have daily issues with the Microsoft servers that require dedicated staff to support. The AS/400s are supported by Unix people, except they don't remember much about administration because they don't ever need to touch the machines. It's like the old story about the Netware 3 box that was discovered sealed behind a wall after five years because renovators didn't realize it was in constant daily use.
Experience 2: I have probably three dozen manufacturing clients who use AS/400's because they do not require dedicated IT administrators. They run nearly everything on the same box. The iSeries moniker is derived from a marketing label for "Integrated". They are designed to run a bunch of applications with very little administrative overhead. They are the everyman's mainframe for a fraction of the cost. (At the low end, anyway) They are capable of tremendous vertical scale for big shops that love the platform. The key niche is really the low end "park it in the corner" shop.
Experience 3: I have two non-profit clients that approached my company regarding "upgrading" their single AS/400's to Windows machines. One did, one didn't. The one that did had to hire two administrators to maintain the additional servers required to run a very small ERP application. Not to mention the fact that the small ERP app required Active Directory, SQL Server, IIS, and a refresh of every Windows machine in the organization. The client that stuck with AS/400 purchased an option that allowed them to plug in blade-type computers running Windows to keep management happy. They sent them back. Instead, they dabbled a bit with Linux micropartitions. It was ok for them, but AS/400 did everything they needed it to do.
In the interest of brevity, I'll stop evangelizing. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a Unix guy through and through. I was a Windows guy but the ulcers were starting to become a real burden. I'm learning AS/400 in my spare time because it makes so much darn sense and its the best keep secret in the industry. If you're interested in conversing in more detail, ping me at scottlewis101-at-yahoo-dot-com. Bottom line: AS/400s are for champagne tastes on a beer budget. If you don't want to be an IT-focused company, absorb the initially higher acquisition cost of AS/400 and save huge amounts of money down the road in reduced complexity, staffing, and resource costs. Work with a business partner, not IBM directly. You'll get the attention and resources you need with less red tape. There are lots of trade-up incentives from the iSeries group to keep iSeries customers from making the mistake of jumping ship just when things are starting to get really interesting.
Cougar,
Last year I took a position with an IBM VAR. I spent the next two months acclimating myself to our client base which spans four states, includes mom-and-pop shops and Fortune 100 shops, and multiple state and federal government clients. We are a Microsoft Gold partner, an IBM Premier Business partner, partnered with SuSE, Sun, Oracle, and a cornucopia of other industry heavyweights. Nothing surprised me in this job more than the number of AS/400 machines in regular daily use by our customers. For simplicity, I will refer to iSeries and i5 machines as AS/400s.
Experience 1: I have one customer that bought a pair of smallish 400s in '97. This client drafted a goal of migrating some custom and ISV code to "something else" because the platform was non-strategic in 2000. Since then, the machines have failed but once, due to an exhaustion of disk space. This was a controlled failure in a sense because the machine was still functional. It apparently went into a "maintenance required" state and paused the applications. 20 minutes later, they were back on the air. This client has had more hardware failures on their pair of s/390s than on the as/400s. They have daily issues with the Microsoft servers that require dedicated staff to support. The AS/400s are supported by Unix people, except they don't remember much about administration because they don't ever need to touch the machines. It's like the old story about the Netware 3 box that was discovered sealed behind a wall after five years because renovators didn't realize it was in constant daily use.
Experience 2: I have probably three dozen manufacturing clients who use AS/400's because they do not require dedicated IT administrators. They run nearly everything on the same box. The iSeries moniker is derived from a marketing label for "Integrated". They are designed to run a bunch of applications with very little administrative overhead. They are the everyman's mainframe for a fraction of the cost. (At the low end, anyway) They are capable of tremendous vertical scale for big shops that love the platform. The key niche is really the low end "park it in the corner" shop.
Experience 3: I have two non-profit clients that approached my company regarding "upgrading" their single AS/400's to Windows machines. One did, one didn't. The one that did had to hire two administrators to maintain the additional servers required to run a very small ERP application. Not to mention the fact that the small ERP app required Active Directory, SQL Server, IIS, and a refresh of every Windows machine in the organization. The client that stuck with AS/400 purchased an option that allowed them to plug in blade-type computers running Windows to keep management happy. They sent them back. Instead, they dabbled a bit with Linux micropartitions. It was ok for them, but AS/400 did everything they needed it to do.
In the interest of brevity, I'll stop evangelizing. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a Unix guy through and through. I was a Windows guy but the ulcers were starting to become a real burden. I'm learning AS/400 in my spare time because it makes so much darn sense and its the best keep secret in the industry. If you're interested in conversing in more detail, ping me at scottlewis101-at-yahoo-dot-com. Bottom line: AS/400s are for champagne tastes on a beer budget. If you don't want to be an IT-focused company, absorb the initially higher acquisition cost of AS/400 and save huge amounts of money down the road in reduced complexity, staffing, and resource costs. Work with a business partner, not IBM directly. You'll get the attention and resources you need with less red tape. There are lots of trade-up incentives from the iSeries group to keep iSeries customers from making the mistake of jumping ship just when things are starting to get really interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I really bunged that formatting up. Let's try that again:
---------------------
Cougar,
Last year I took a position with an IBM VAR. I spent the next two months acclimating myself to our client base which spans four states, includes mom-and-pop shops and Fortune 100 shops, and multiple state and federal government clients. We are a Microsoft Gold partner, an IBM Premier Business partner, partnered with SuSE, Sun, Oracle, and a cornucopia of other industry heavyweights. Nothing surprised me in this job more than the number of AS/400 machines in regular daily use by our customers. For simplicity, I will refer to iSeries and i5 machines as AS/400s.
Experience 1: I have one customer that bought a pair of smallish 400s in '97. This client drafted a goal of migrating some custom and ISV code to "something else" because the platform was non-strategic in 2000. Since then, the machines have failed but once, due to an exhaustion of disk space. This was a controlled failure in a sense because the machine was still functional. It apparently went into a "maintenance required" state and paused the applications. 20 minutes later, they were back on the air. This client has had more hardware failures on their pair of s/390s than on the as/400s. They have daily issues with the Microsoft servers that require dedicated staff to support. The AS/400s are supported by Unix people, except they don't remember much about administration because they don't ever need to touch the machines. It's like the old story about the Netware 3 box that was discovered sealed behind a wall after five years because renovators didn't realize it was in constant daily use.
Experience 2: I have probably three dozen manufacturing clients who use AS/400's because they do not require dedicated IT administrators. They run nearly everything on the same box. The iSeries moniker is derived from a marketing label for "Integrated". They are designed to run a bunch of applications with very little administrative overhead. They are the everyman's mainframe for a fraction of the cost. (At the low end, anyway) They are capable of tremendous vertical scale for big shops that love the platform. The key niche is really the low end "park it in the corner" shop.
Experience 3: I have two non-profit clients that approached my company regarding "upgrading" their single AS/400's to Windows machines. One did, one didn't. The one that did had to hire two administrators to maintain the additional servers required to run a very small ERP application. Not to mention the fact that the small ERP app required Active Directory, SQL Server, IIS, and a refresh of every Windows machine in the organization. The client that stuck with AS/400 purchased an option that allowed them to plug in blade-type computers running Windows to keep management happy. They sent them back. Instead, they dabbled a bit with Linux micropartitions. It was ok for them, but AS/400 did everything they needed it to do.
In the interest of brevity, I'll stop evangelizing. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a Unix guy through and through. I was a Windows guy but the ulcers were starting to become a real burden. I'm learning AS/400 in my spare time because it makes so much darn sense and its the best keep secret in the industry. If you're interested in conversing in more detail, ping me at scottlewis101-at-yahoo-dot-com. Bottom line: AS/400s are for champagne tastes on a beer budget. If you don't want to be an IT-focused company, absorb the initially higher acquisition cost of AS/400 and save huge amounts of money down the road in reduced complexity, staffing, and resource costs. Work with a business partner, not IBM directly. You'll get the attention and resources you need with less red tape. There are lots of trade-up incentives from the iSeries group to keep iSeries customers from making the mistake of jumping ship just when things are starting to get really interesting.
Cougar, Last year I took a position with an IBM VAR. I spent the next two months acclimating myself to our client base which spans four states, includes mom-and-pop shops and Fortune 100 shops, and multiple state and federal government clients. We are a Microsoft Gold partner, an IBM Premier Business partner, partnered with SuSE, Sun, Oracle, and a cornucopia of other industry heavyweights. Nothing surprised me in this job more than the number of AS/400 machines in regular daily use by our customers. For simplicity, I will refer to iSeries and i5 machines as AS/400s. Experience 1: I have one customer that bought a pair of smallish 400s in '97. This client drafted a goal of migrating some custom and ISV code to "something else" because the platform was non-strategic in 2000. Since then, the machines have failed but once, due to an exhaustion of disk space. This was a controlled failure in a sense because the machine was still functional. It apparently went into a "maintenance required" state and paused the applications. 20 minutes later, they were back on the air. This client has had more hardware failures on their pair of s/390s than on the as/400s. They have daily issues with the Microsoft servers that require dedicated staff to support. The AS/400s are supported by Unix people, except they don't remember much about administration because they don't ever need to touch the machines. It's like the old story about the Netware 3 box that was discovered sealed behind a wall after five years because renovators didn't realize it was in constant daily use. Experience 2: I have probably three dozen manufacturing clients who use AS/400's because they do not require dedicated IT administrators. They run nearly everything on the same box. The iSeries moniker is derived from a marketing label for "Integrated". They are designed to run a bunch of applications with very little administrative overhead. They are the everyman's mainframe for a fraction of the cost. (At the low end, anyway) They are capable of tremendous vertical scale for big shops that love the platform. The key niche is really the low end "park it in the corner" shop. Experience 3: I have two non-profit clients that approached my company regarding "upgrading" their single AS/400's to Windows machines. One did, one didn't. The one that did had to hire two administrators to maintain the additional servers required to run a very small ERP application. Not to mention the fact that the small ERP app required Active Directory, SQL Server, IIS, and a refresh of every Windows machine in the organization. The client that stuck with AS/400 purchased an option that allowed them to plug in blade-type computers running Windows to keep management happy. They sent them back. Instead, they dabbled a bit with Linux micropartitions. It was ok for them, but AS/400 did everything they needed it to do. In the interest of brevity, I'll stop evangelizing. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a Unix guy through and through. I was a Windows guy but the ulcers were starting to become a real burden. I'm learning AS/400 in my spare time because it makes so much darn sense and its the best keep secret in the industry. If you're interested in conversing in more detail, ping me at scottlewis101-at-yahoo-dot-com. Bottom line: AS/400s are for champagne tastes on a beer budget. If you don't want to be an IT-focused company, absorb the initially higher acquisition cost of AS/400 and save huge amounts of money down the road in reduced complexity, staffing, and resource costs. Work with a business partner, not IBM directly. You'll get the attention and resources you need with less red tape. There are lots of trade-up incentives from the iSeries group to keep iSeries customers from making the mistake of jumping ship just when things are starting to get really interesting.