Thursday, November 14, 2013

6 Great Reasons to Replace your AS/400

If you are running your business on an AS/400 IBM iSeries and wondering how much longer you can wait - then consider the following:

6. Data Availability - High availability and point-of-time data requirements for audit purposes have become the norm in this stringent regulatory climate. This is easily possible with today's RDBMS systems like open source PostgreSQL. With AS/400 this feature is available only through table journaling, impacting performance and costing money.

They just look old
5. Hardware Cost - The cost of a iSeries hardware and software combination is higher than that of a comparable Linux, Mac OS or Windows based system. In this age of increased data loads for businesses, increasing the cluster size is inexpensive on a Linux/Mac based hardware when compared to an iSeries based expansion.

Love the user interface
4. Support Cost - Even though total cost of ownership was the basis of using AS/400 initially, the landscape has changed today with ever increasing interactivity between disparate applications across the enterprise. Administering a legacy AS/400 in this environment is not cost effective because of high cost of support.

3. Declining AS/400 Staff - One of the main factors in switching from an AS/400 is internal support. There is a declining availability of AS/400 experts and programmers in RPG within the company. Companies that do have staff in this area are 20-25 year veterans who are close to retirement.

2. Application Support - More and more ERP providers in the mid-market are no longer supporting RPG versions of their products. You might have already received that call from your provider informing you that support will no long be available after the end of the year.

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The AS/400 was the system of choice in the mad dash to prepare for Y2K. The A/S400 started as a System 34 and has since become the iSeries and later simply System i as IBM continues to evolve the hardware. This is just hardware, but the software makes the difference. One of the reasons the AS/400 and its offspring are still around is that the legacy software was too hard to migrate to the latest generation of server.  For the reasons stated above - you can save money by replacing your AS/400 in favor of the latest server technology (I'm an Apple fan) which is reason enough. So why wait until you find yourself caught with software that is no longer supported? Investigate, plan and execute on your schedule, but the time is now.