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Reasons to Stick With the Classic AS400 Series

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Programmers
·Nov 19, 2020·

6 min read

AS400 is still considered as a pricey relic from a bygone era. As technology is enhancing day by day and the cost of cloud hosting is decreasing, organization have declared AS400 as outdated. The retirees are creating a hole in the market which is filling at a very low speed because the youngsters are not looking at IBMi or RPG as a career option. Due to this, organizations are afraid of the lack of IT support and are hesitating in relying on the technology.

But is this really true? No.

AS400 may be an old IBM series but it has evolved overtime and is successfully used in many big technology organizations. The companies that depend on mission critical systems and complex ERP systems, for them AS400 or IBMi series has proved to be of great help and support. People think that as IBMi or AS400 is considered as a legacy technology therefore there would be lack of IT support and proper guidance. But this perception is completely denied by some of the best organizations of the world. Hiring RPG developers from reliable third party sources and maintaining your own team with their help is the feasible option that companies are choosing without hesitation. This approach has helped them work with talented IBM i programmers keeping their system strong and profitable.

Companies relying on IBMi development

AS400 servers are still fairly common. According to iDatalabs, IBM hardware is used by about 10.1% of companies, making it the second most popular type of server after HP servers i.e. 24%.

However, these figures cannot be said as exact because IBM hardware supports other, more popular operating systems, but it’s unclear what proportion of the users on those systems are actually using the IBM architecture.

AS400 is popular in high-tech, core, mission critical industries, such as manufacturing, computer software, logistics etc. Many big American companies are using AS400 extensively and it has a tough grip over midmarket companies (38%), but is used across organizations of all sizes. Companies like Robert Bosch and CVS Health earn a lot of profit and generate significant revenue. They opted to install IBM Power systems to run their IT systems, depending on their performance, reliability and scalability.

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Why is IBM Power system still the most trusted?

Although the AS400 i series has made its space among the legacy technologies but still it is one of the most trusted server series. Why? The answer is right below:

  1. Preserving the AS400 performance and reliability: The biggest reason why the latest IBM iSeries are extensively used by the companies round the globe is the power of the AS400 series. The IBM AS400 was built with robust hardware redundancy. These features are still preserved in the IBM iSeries that make it extremely high-performing, with CPUs that are 3-5 times more powerful than others. For applications that require extremely high performance and low downtime and for many other hard core applications, IBM power systems are reliable.

  2. Availability AS400 options: Opting for AS400 or IBM Power systems is useful for any type of organization. From inexpensive, entry-level systems to high power, redundant servers, IBM has solution for every business that is scalable and secure. The IBM iSeries also support multiple operating systems, such as AIX, IBM i, SUSE and RedHat Enterprise Linux.

  1. Moving away from IBM Power Systems is not recommended: This is true that IBM Power Systems have a higher price per core than competitors, but this price increase is worth it. The cores in IBM Power Systems are much more powerful. Any price savings gained by migrating hardware will be useless because there will be more expense and disruption in moving to another platform. Switching from the AS400 could mean having to install and configure new software and audit and update your data once again which can be a huge task for your team and expensive for you. This can also be extremely disruptive, In these situations, moving away from it wastes a lot of money, time and talent.

Conclusion

Businesses have relied on AS400 systems since the inception and have grown with it over the years. Organizations using the system already know how useful, powerful and efficient these systems are. Especially for companies that deal in very critical, core tasks they need highly efficient, secure and competitive systems/servers for data storage and functioning. IBM Power systems today have overcome every other option because of their extraordinary features, reliability and scalability.