For those of you who don't know. An IBM AS400 is a midrange mainframe. Basically a big ass server.
Here's the situation.
I have an older IBM AS400 at one of my hospitals. It's on it's very last lag. It's terribly slow and for the last year I have lost quite a bit of sleep over it crashing.
I finally found myself in an advantageous situation where I could replace the damn thing with a brand new iSeries (new version of the as400).
Shitty thing is, to migrate to the new server I have had to take the old one down for quite a while.
Tonight the mission was to do a full system save, roughly a million or so objects. Close to a terabytes worth of data.
On any other full system save I would use SLR60 Tapes to backup the data because that is what is inherently installed in the mainframe. Since I am migrating to a new server I have had to rent a new external tape drive that wills support the same media as the new server.
Suffice it to say, installing anything new on a mainframe as old as this one (going on eight years), is not the easiest task in the world.
For one, it barely supports the interface (propriety IBM PCI variant), and to beat it all when I go to use it, the damn thing fucks up.
I planned for a full system save time of around seven hours.
That seven hours has now turned into nine and I forsee it going to twelve hours.
Downtime on an Information System that is relied upon to control EVERYTHING in an environment is basically unacceptable and causes alot of hardship on the employees of that environment. So, for the time being everybody hates my ass. Just one of the perks of IT world.
Anyway, i've posted some pictures below so you can revel in my struggles.
AS400 Mainframe Cracked open for the first time since being manufactured.
Brand new Tape Drive I had to crack open.
Tape feed assembly of the drive I had to fix.
The Horror! Gut's everywhere!
After Five Hours, Hazaa! Writing to the drive!
Edit:
It was indeed a twelve hour ordeal. All systems operational after Full System Save. Ready for Migration.
