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OK so you want a VPS to support a proprietary piece of software from 1988? The developers have, or are retiring and IBM recommends you upgrade.
Hilarious, AS400 is older than many people on here. Best story I heard from the IT of a top 100 retailer in Germany was, that they were parsing the contents of the fax interface to fill transactional email templates.
But I guess the OP doesn't have a chance to migrate over to anything else that quickly and so old shit is gonna run until the pain is large enough as always.
I wonder if proxmox could run this or if hes gonna need an emulator.
He is going to have fun finding some one with a Power Server willing to rent it out to him and support it. If he does find some one it will not be seven dollars a month. Power alone on that baby will probably kill him.
PC Support with OS/400: takes me back. Token Ring anyone?
For thrashing the proverbial..
http://pub400.com/
Here. I always liked TR and preferred it over Ethernet for a long time. As for the AS/400 I liked it a lot but I didn't like to develop on/for it. How could one not like e.g. the LIC mechanism that allows you to run code written in the 90ies with todays modern Power processors? Plus AS/400 are known to be very stable and reliable. There are quite many quite old systems out there reliably doing their work since decades.
And no, they do not consume huge amounts of energy; keep in mind that they are meant for business/org use.
@VpnkuDua
That won't be easy to find because the vast majority of AS/400 are well "guarded" as they often run business/org critical processes. About the only way I see is the way I have access to some beauties and that is by knowing well (and being trusted by) an admin (in my case of a state agency) and having helped him often enough ...
Otherwise use the link provided by @AlwaysSkint. The pricing there is quite OK.
@jsg From a tech. perspective I like TR but got bitten on my 1st encounter when I unplugged a PC and brought down the whole network. Didn't know back then about terminations.
Never really got my teeth into mid-range until AIX/HP-UX/Solaris - S/36 & AS/400 were just the backend to networked PCs & terminals, for me.
Yes, TR could seem to be an unfriendly beast. But then the typical environment where TR and an AS/400 (or a S/3x) where used almost always had clear rules for users not to touch anything at the back of their systems but to call an admin.
That's no help. The hardware is nearly given away. What you pay a high price for the software (and support). There's nothing in the license agreement that would allow you to run it in an emulator, either. Precisely why everyone fled proprietary lock-in systems at the first opportunity.
I programmed a Unix app that replaced an AS400 app, and that was a LONG time ago. There are AS400 emulator apps around though. Web search finds them easily.
'cept for the Windoze/DirtyMac bunch.
@VpnkuDua I can offer a AS/400 Type 9401-150 dedicated host for $500/m.
It's called iSeries now :-) Actually, the IBM rep calls it iSeries eServer or something...IBM was always horrible at marketing.
In some environments, IBM does everything. You call a tech if anything is going to be touched...and then there's a level beyond that where it's all remote-managed by IBM. And then there's a level beyond that where it's sitting in an IBM datacenter. IBM has always been a "we want to run your entire IT for you" kind of company, more so than any other vendor.
Linux is older than some people here and Unix definitely is.
iSeries/AS400 is still widely used. It's a great platform. DB/400 is the built-in relational database, and IBM's POWER8 hardware is great, though expensive. It's the mainframe - those things could take a Tomah.awk missile in the side and keep running, while the AS/400 doesn't have quite that level of bullet-proof-ed-ness, but pretty close. That's because mainframe improvements are eventually filtered down to iSeries and to some extent to AIX.
But on LET? Get outta here...the people running AS/400s are banks, Fortune 500s, school systems, and governments.
Nobody runs their business on Apple/Mac servers (and nobody used AS400s as workstations).
Windows is a bit different... at least you buy a perpetual license and it runs on standard hardware. You can keep your Windows 2000 software running under KVM/ESX/etc. forever. That said... I hate Windows.
Not only that I did a workup on a newer PowerPC server a bit ago and the cost to run the damned thing in a datacenter was over 200 USD in power alone. IBM has told people to get away from the AS400 and move up. There will be no more support for it within two years.
As it was stated to me, the developers are either retiring, or moving on to other projects. They can not support the software indefinitely and have no wish to even try.
Diverse side notes:
One can run Unix (Aix) applications on an AS/400 and one can even run Windows under some limited AS/400 protection because one can put whole x86 boards into larger AS/400 systems (IIRC up to about a dozend of them).
Yes, those machines, nowadays very similar to Power servers, do need more energy than x86 based servers but they also offer much more (computing power, availability, resilience, etc), so your complaints are somewhat like complaining about a real truck needing more gas than a pickup.
Also keep the use case in mind. AS/400 are usually purchased and kept running for a small eternity because the customers have a set of needs that is quite different from what typical x86 server customer need. That's also the reason why those customers don't care at all about losing about 5% of performance for running everything basically on a VM. And if they really need performance they can buy more performance far beyond what's available in the x86 universe.
TL;DR The reasons to buy a certain system as well as the needs and priorities are quite different in the x86 and the AS/400 universe. If AS/400 were really that "expensive", using "way too much power", etc, etc, there wouldn't be thousands and thousands of those systems in companies/orgs all over the world, many of them very well kept and working for more than a decade.
As for the statement that no company would run their business on Macs I'd slightly change that to "nobody with a working brain" - and still be wrong. There are companies insane enough to bet on Apple gadgets.
I will agree with you on that @jsg I never said they would not do it all. I know a lot and when I say a lot I mean alot, of such businesses right now. Sure they run the AS/400 systems and yes they are stable, as far as they go.
Once you try mixing and matching then you tend to have problems, if it is not IBM they tend to not like them. Can it be done? Sure it can and has been done.
The point I was trying to make was, you come to a site that has a specific demographic and then want to moon in terms of what you are asking. Most people do not even know what an AS/400 system looks like, let alone that it existed. Next you have to consider cost of running such a system in today's world. As was mentioned $500 a month and I think that is steal, considering half of that would be power alone.
That is why most people that run these run them in-house. They do not let some one else manage them for them, unless it is an IBM tech, and the info inside them would dictate as such.
So to sum up I guess I mean, that if you run an AS/400 system you mean business and that is to say you don't half ass it. AS/400 is not a game nor is meant to be used as one.
@AuroraZ
"Mixing and matching" was something IBM never liked as far as I think back. But that should be seen in the relevant context: responsability and reliability. Which stunningly often translates to both, IBM and the customer, have priorities that are quite different from those one sees in the majority of the x86 universe.
Usually an AS/400 was/is purchased as part of a solution package, something like running all the usual core stuff of not small companies (all the admin, HR, finance stuff) and the "high" costs (a) are not all that high in terms of TCO, and (b) are perceived differently.
Explanation: A typical AS/400 mindset has elements like "costs avoided", "piece of mind", and virtually guaranteed quickly solved problems. That kind of management doesn't think so much in terms of "how much bang for the buck?" (as we do here) but more in terms of "if that system fails, we lose 3 million $ per day, open ourselves to legal problems, and lose trust and customers" and that is what they put next to "high energy costs", "high base price" (of the AS/400), etc.. Looking at it from that perspective $500 or even $2000 per month for power and even some hundred thousand $ for the system becomes paltry, even neglegible.
Back then nearly everything was IBM in that firm, apart from one Mac, one Amstrad CPC something (running CP/M) and one Compaq PC with an incompatible BIOS. Dumb terminals, PC/XT and PC/AT ruled the roost until the new fangled PS/2 started to appear. Can't remember what the AS/400's predecessor was, which by the time I appeared, was languishing in a corner ready to be scrapped.
T'was IBM so had to be good & no IT Manager would get sacked for buying into that scene. That was then.
Cost? Nah, that didn't come into it.
Same today in big business, ofc when the idea permates not much you can do about it.
Haven't really looked at that hardware since the POWER6 gen, but back then, a field tech told me there was only one part difference between their P-series Unix gear that ran AIX and AS/400 hardware. For some reason, I seem to recall it might have been the CD drive or something like that. Anyway, yes, it's the same gear with a different OS.
Exactly. Unlike your typical LET poster who claims they're losing millions per minute of downtime, some people really do lose millions per minute of downtime.
There's also some markets that are formidable to enter due to regulatory overhead, and once you've taken a system + app through certification and gained marketshare, it can be cost-prohibitive for a new player to enter the market.
Most people today don't remember that sort of vertical-specific system, but I remember as late as the early 2000s that if you wanted to enter a particular market, you bought a specific app that ran on a specific Unix. For example, a previous employer was heavily committed to HP-UX & the Informix database because HP-UX & Informix owned the warehousing market, and they didn't publish 4GL compiler tools for other operating systems. An aerospace company I worked for ran ConvexOS, an obscure room-sized system with hundreds of 1GB HPPA drives, because that's was the only vendor for a particular package they needed. Etc.
Something fun from Wikipedia:
"It is noteworthy that after the departure of CEO John Akers in 1993, when IBM looked likely to be split up, Bill Gates commented that the only part of IBM that Microsoft would be interested in was the AS/400 division. (At the time, many of Microsoft's business and financial systems ran on the AS/400 platform, something that ceased to be the case around 1999, with the introduction of Windows 2000.)"
^ Akers went to the Knacker's?