We are moving from our ancient iSeries 5 (purchased in 2001 with less than 6 hours cumulative downtime) to a new Power 8. Are the new systems just as reliable and sturdy as the old AS400/iSeries units? Also, the new Power 8's no longer ship with built-in tape drives, so I'm seriously considering taking the plunge to cloud backup with an on-site device. Is there any down side to this I'm not taking into consideration?
Posted Sep 17, 2015, 5:57 PM UTC
We've have actually moved away from tape and do straight to disk. We do this via FTP and keep a local back up and off site. Just create your save files like you would to tape except just FTP them via a script.
Another option is to buy an external library, small one, maybe a TS3100, that should do the work.
UPDATE! I've got my new Power 8 installed and working on getting everything set up. It's beautiful. This time around, we went rack mount.
Just installed one last week, with a Flash system. Seriously fast. Booted in under a minute. I have a few others in my area. have yet to be called out to fix them, seem as reliable as ever.
Be aware they no longer have internal storage.
Ours has been in production for two months now. It's amazingly fast. For example, an inventory update that used to take 3 hours to process now takes barely 30 seconds. I'm in heaven!
Well CPW is phenomenal in comparison but considering how long you kept your current systems CPW is probably not much of a consideration in your situation.
Not much out there for the Cloud. There are some things that I have seen but nothing I would choose to house my production backups.
We are trying to move away from tape libraries into a VTL. Cloud support for the VTL will come later but we don't expect to see any top tier providers for at least 18 months. Expensive but our environment deams it necessary.
A small external attached Tap lib might be what you are looking for unless you can afford a VTL.
System i OS is still solid as it has always been but if you are coming from V5 I would try to upgrade to at least 6.1 before you migrate (V7 would be best but you may run into a hardware limitation)
We're using Infor A+ software v.8.03.01, and upgrading to it's latest version release (10+) so the OS isn't an issue. I'm going to configure the new box first then populate our library data and run a test environment for a few weeks before going live. We're not the first Infor customer to go through this process so I've got good guidance. We even get better pricing with our Infor partnership on the Power 8. V5R4 OS had its support discontinued a while ago, so we've had some heavy maintenance costs these last two years. I'll be happy to catch up to the most current releases. In the last six months, I've had to replace the controller cards twice and the cache battery.
I'm looking at the Cloud service offered by Aktion, which uses an onsite server device to backup then transmits to their Cloud service. Honestly, I've never needed to restore from the tape backups and the last time we required them was 2001 when we migrated to the current system. I still dutifully do quarterly system backups and daily library backups, with one set on site and one set off site.