Question of a Newbie to iSeries

Good morning list.

I'm a newbie to iSeries ... My experience is with zSeries machines ... The company I work for acquired another company and my boss tasked me to check the gathering of info for a new AS/400 ... I apologize if some parts of my question are nonsense ... I just do not know the machine ... I will appreciate also answers to questions that I did not ask but I should have asked :-) Thank you in advance for your help.

The current situation is:

The AS/400 is a Desk Side 8203 - E4A machine running SS1 version 5.4. It has 8 GB memory and a 5364 processor. The processor is a 1Core 4.2GHz Power 6, Capacity CPW 4300/4300. It contains 3 disks of 140 GB - Which are RAID-1 mirrored totalling 420GB effective. It is backed up by an internal 800/1600 LTO4.

The data center landscape follows:

Our data center is based mostly on zSeries (z/OS and zLinux) and xSeries (virtualized blades running mostly ESX/Windoze and a few Linuxes). The blades are IBM BladeCenter Model H. There are MDSes to connect to the SAN fabric. Currently the Windows+Linux Storage is an XIV and the mainframe storage in a DS8700.

The window-linux backups nowadays are done using TSM with 3592 drives on an IBM-3494. They are going to be soon on a Netbackup solution using Clarion disks and two quantum 7000 robots with LTO5 drives. The new solution will be accesed via the SAN fabric.

The z/OS backups are executed today with a 7720 VTL (dasd-only) and a 3953 library manager and a TS3500 robot with 3592 drives. The VTL and the Library manager are accesed via the SAN fabric over FICON links.


Now the problems:

1 - We must upgrade it ASAP due to capacity and other issues.
We are considering either a blade center based PS700 or a rack mounted 8202-04B. Sounds good ?

2 - Our preferred storage for the task is the XIV. Anyone with experience with it ?
I understand that a virtual I/O server is required for it. Any comments on this ?

3 - Any possibility you see how we can backup using our current above mentioned backup equipment ? Any experience backing up the iSeries disks from a different machine ?

4 - Anyone with experience backing up with a TS3100 ? We are short of MDS ports at this time ... Any comments on how to connect a tape drive directly or library directly to a blade center not via the SAN fabric ?

5 - Any good resource for self-education on iSeries ? Links that it is worthwhile to look at ?

6 - Any comments on the migration to the new machine ?