AS400 -
by Jesse on Aug.10, 2008, under Data Migration
It’s 4am – Just finished an AS400 migration from 8830 to DMX – Went swimmingly well. Shut down the system, swing the cables, split the RDF, and boot it back up. Since it’s a direct-attach there is no pesky zoning or masking to deal with. 
AS400′s are an odd beast. The only way to boot them from the Symm is to use a Load Source Emulator, which is to say, a customized Fibre-SCSI bridge that is about the size and shape of a 3.5″ SCSI drive. It slides into the SCSI slot on the AS400 and has a cable sticking out the front of it.
If you ask me, it’s not the most efficient way of doing it, but interesting none-the-less. Then again I’ve never been a big fan of some of the intricacies of IBM hardware, though I *LOVE* AIX as an operating system.
Got a VMS host to do next weekend. *THOSE* are difficult to design around, because they actually depend on the Symmetrix device (Hypervolume or Meta-Head) number being the same. Not just the LUN number. So any binfile has to have the VMS devices in the same locations. –Major pain.
August 13th, 2008 on 3:16 pm
Newer AS400′s (or system i as they are called nowadays) do not require LSEs anymore… They can IPL directly using a fiber connection, although EMC only supports boot via SAN
August 16th, 2008 on 7:50 am
I’m hoping they can run boot and data down the same path, one of my biggest complaints is having to use two dedicated ports for AS400 traffic. Right now we’ve got 8dA with nothing but the LSE on it, and 8dB with the data volumes on it. That is a tremendous waste of DMX ports when much cheaper switch ports could be used.