Re: Just a reminder to not use Host Table Entries

I don't know the US prices. But for what POWER machines with IBM i cost
nowadays I always bundle the vHMC and additional memory and CPU (unless
it's a P05 machine). I love the x22 models where you can have a lot of
cores and memory and it still counts as P10. I even got one customer to
finally move their other DB VM (IIRC a MySQL DB running on Linux) to the
POWER machine when they had some performance issues running it on x86...
It is up to us to at least start the conversation on what the machine can
do and to try to get the customer to take advantage of the resources...

On Mon, 13 Mar 2023 at 10:12, Patrik Schindler <poc@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello Larry,

Am 13.03.2023 um 13:17 schrieb Larry DrFranken Bolhuis <
midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:

I could regale you with many stories where this mentality hurt the

company, and nearly none where it helped.

That's my point.

VERY often someone rather high in I.T., perhaps a CTO or even CEO gets

fed the biggest lie in all of I.T.: "IBM i is just AS/400 with a coat of
black paint. It's old, incapable, and needs to go away."

That sounds pretty familiar. The cases I've witnessed were often kicked
off by external consultants, just knowing about Windows and maybe a bit of
this mysterious Linux thing. This situation is worsened by the gold guy
retiring next year and finding an AS/400 guy as replacement proves almost
impossible. They're virtually not existent.

This paints the IBM i team into a corner putting them on the back foot,

in a defensive position. Then sadly, all too often, it's discovered that
the IBM i team has been treating the platform like it IS an AS/400! They
continue using record level I/O, building new subfile programs, and writing
in fixed form RPG/400 with SEU. They've given the boss all the ammunition
he needs.

This *might* also stem from a boss not giving the team the necessary
resources to learn and exploit the newer techniques available with newer
releases of the platform. If those guys are kept busy with implementing yet
another specialized but rarely needed report, I don't wonder. Additionally,
if the boss is like "what's the benefit compared to the status quo", the
guys are also in the corner, because it works (almost) perfectly. Why fix
what it is (apparently) not broken? (Note: This is not my argument!)

Also it's frequently discovered that the server itself was sold as a

'one purpose machine.' It was configure to run just an ERP package.

Yeah, but that's pretty much how things worked back in the day. Machines
were specialized. The AS/400 was for ERP. The NT Server was for file
sharing. The Linux Box was doing the intranet website. It is just another
case of using the "right" tool for the job. "Right" being a relative truth,
depending on the skills and resources of the people involved in
establishing that function.

I observed that most (German) firms aren't really interested in brands or
ideological discussions about the best platform. They usually have a
problem to solve. They give you the money if charges are reasonable, and
you provide the solution. If you only sell a product and leave them with
that, they're unhappy and sooner or later will seek someone else's
consultancy, not only selling them a product but provide implementation
into the existing infrastructure, and service (updates, support, etc.).

This gives a lot of freedom to the implementors to choose their preferred
product. The customer doesn't care as long as the pricing is reasonable and
the thing does the job. Since IBM i is a niche product in here, it rarely
is considered to be a target platform for new stuff being put on, unless
there are people involved knowing the platform good enough to include it in
the planning process.

Again, my observations are mainly about small to mid-sized companies.

No room for growth, no ability to add additional partitions (Virtual

Machines), no ability to use advanced technologies like remote copy, flash
copy, live partition migration, and such.

Of course not. IBM pricing usually dictated to buy the machine with just
enough resources to provide a reasonable computing environment.

This is somehow a chicken-egg problem. If you don't put more (reasonable)
workload on the machine, it's hard to justify expenses for it. If you
don't, users start complaining about "the AS400 being slow again".

As a consequence even if the boss throws the IBM i team a bone: "Hey,

can't that server run Linux? I have an app that we need that might fit well
there."

If the boss is technically interested, this might happen.

Still the team might refuse because "we have no clue about that Linux
thing and already more work to do that we can handle".

But the server has no HMC, no spare memory, no available disk and

acquiring them will take took long, so "Just put it on VMWare."

Yes. From a overall economic viewpoint, this is often the cheapest
solution.

And as a consequence, all too often: "We have met the enemy, and he is

us!"

Yes. And for that reason I think it's important to build bridges by not
doing things in the backroom (local hosts file) but seek communication to
the other team asking for a dns entry, bothering them, and making them
aware that in the end, there is *one* network connecting all machines.

Building islands has been a bad idea ever since. But it's a natural thing
for humans to do.

:wq! PoC

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