Re: QIC tape support & as/436

On 16-Sep-2015 18:59 -0600, Tommy.Holden wrote:

A colleague of mine has a client with an old as/436 (yep that's right
a 436!) and they are looking at getting a shiny new system.
The problem (well other than doing multiple upgrades in the process)
is that the only drive on the system is the trusty internal QIC tape
drive.

The Machine/36 (*M36) capabilities were removed many releases ago, as was the System/36 Migration Utility features. I suspect there are many more /problems/ to deal with, than what is alluded.

Since I'm not really that much of a hardware guy I thought I'd see
if anyone knows if there are external QIC drives that will work with
a new system (most likely entry level and cheapest on the market)
running on v7.2.I suspect they might be SOL on that front.

And SOL for the inability to keep the guested Machine 36, I expect.

According to the midrange.com wiki it appears that the 436 can run
v5r1 and if I'm reading that correctly then we can handle most of the
stuff up to that point

If that is the final release of the migration feature, then I suppose that means the intent is to move their S/36 to the System/36 Execution Environment (S/36EE) on OS/400 v5r1 instead of whatever is their even older release?

then it's finding someone that can restore to v5r4 & save at v5r4 and
load that to the v7.2 box.

If their /system/ [i.e. applications] remains in S/36EE [vs M36] per already having been ported to the S36EE, and if they can move from v5r1 to v5r4 [greater than N+2], then they could similarly skip all the way to v7r2.?

Maybe I'm underestimating but I love seeing any company stepping
forward instead of clinging to the past so any assistance would be
most appreciated!

Significantly underestimating, if I understand correctly. Having put-off their transition for so long, the ease of staying with the IBM i may not be much better than moving to another system :-(

FWiW:
[http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l/201302/msg00032.html]
[http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l/201302/msg00071.html]
[http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l/201302/msg00054.html]

P.S. What a pain finding those in the archive; google seems no longer to have the archive [well] indexed, as initially all I could find was the gmane version:
[http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.hardware.ibm.midrange/184001]