Re: AS/400 vs. IBM i

Am 23.10.2019 um 20:13 schrieb DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Who are these "others"?

Anyone in the computing game that knows anything about current technology.

And you're tying the fact people being up to front in technology to a simple name? Come on!

I cry foul on that. They DO! When that one Ethernet cable is severed or switch port fails or switch fails they are down. AND THEY CARE!

When they are down for hours for backup because you didn't leverage HA or VTL or Flashcopy technology. THEY CARE.

When a RAID card chokes and the machine stops because you don't have redundancy. THEY CARE.

When you need to do PTFs to keep the system up to date and you have to spend hours copying them around and fattening up your backups and spending more time and money than you should. THEY CARE.

No, they don't care. They're lamenting that something with the AS/400 doesn't work and it's the sysadmin's responsibility to solve the problem. They don't care about if it's an i or AS/400 or a turquoise giraffe! They want to do their job and that's about it.

Even in a simple character based interface, when an inquiry takes many seconds of their time because the logic is RLA and stacked program calls when it could take less than a second when leveraging the power of SQL. THEY CARE.

I'm always negatively surprised how "technology advantage" kills sheer performance of current processors and I/O-possibilities with bloatware like Java and Node.js. On modern hardware, it may be fast enough but on my private 150 (yes very outdated but reliable and good enough for private use with low power consumption), the difference between embedded SQL and classic READ/WRITE/UPDATE is *very* perceptible. But this is a very different topic.

Again, user's will tell you the the AS/400 is unbearably slow and you need to fix it, if you're the responsible sysadmin.

I'll give you that the users personally don't know about the server in many cases. They use an application. But they absolutely care if it's available and responsive. Try turning it off and listen to the hue and cry!

Yes. You're absolutely right. But that's not my point. My point is that they don't care about the name. They say AS/400 and they don't understand when you talk about IBM i on Power Series.

Not at all. These capabilities extend right down to the very smallest. And much of it is extremely low cost, often down to implementation costs. No matter how small the company the users hate it when they can't get to their applications!! Even today I dealt with a company that has only 6 users who were unable to work because their server went away. No it was not IBM i it was Windows but I can assure you those users were extremely unhappy sitting there staring at customers across the counter while unable to help them. They cared.

Yes. And yet, they don't care if the server is Windows or whatever. Again: Keeping the whole ship sailing is the responsibility of IT staff, not the user's.

I'm not working hard. How did you get this impression?

Because you wrote an entire wiki to defend the past perhaps?

No. There's much more in that Wiki and it will slowly grow as I add stuff. On the net there's an awful lot of information to you-know-what but it's very hard to actually find a good starting point to provide helpful information in a halfways organized manner. It's my wish to provide a starting point, explain some technobabble I struggled with also in my beginning, give examples and links to further documentation.

Problem solved!!

No, because the old name is stuck within the users and you aren't allowed to slap them until they behave like you expect them to do. And user's don't care about the name and I also don't care because I know that there's a notable difference between machines from 1989 and machines from 2019. I'm a sysadmin. I know, as I'm supposed to. But at the same I don't care for the name also, because other sysadmins involved also know what I'm talking about when we're talking about AS/400 and V7R4 and whatnot.

See the other comments, especially from John Yeung. He spoke my words in a different way.

Again, you're tying the fact people being up to front in technology to a simple name? Come on! Why so emotional?

:wq! PoC

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