How to identify PCI vs SPD device on AS/400

[tbrowne]

I'm preparing to update the OS on an AS/400 9406 model 720 from Release 4.5.0 to 5.2.0. IBM no longer supports SPD based devices in Release 5 and greater. Can anyone tell me how to determine whether a device is PCI or SPD by looking at the system configuration printout or other AS/400 tool?

I'm not a hardware person and this problem has me by the horns.

 

[jrjuiliano]

From

http://www.midrangeserver.com/tfh/tfh021703-story01.html:

To begin with, a bunch of hardware is not supported on the new iSeries machines. Migration I/O towers and SPD I/O towers, for instance, are not supported. Companies will have to convert the feature 5065 PCI towers to feature 5074 towers, feature 5066 towers to feature 5079 towers, and feature 5075 towers to feature 5074. As companies do upgrades, IBM is suggesting that they buy the new towers, rekit the disks in these old towers to the new towers (or upgrade them to new drives), and then attach the new tower to the new iSeries server. Companies will have to preserve RAID groups as they move over. SPD-based I/O processing and adapter cards are not supported on the new machines, obviously, since they require an SPD tower. All SPD and migration towers must be converted to High-Speed Link towers before an upgrade. This is going to take a little fancy dancing, and there are a number of ways to accomplish this. Get IBM's help for the best way.


I also found this LPAR, which looks like it has feature numbers which you can match to your hardware descriptions:

http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/lpar/pdf/lpar.pdf

Hope that helps!

J.R.

 

[tbrowne]

Thank you for the information - it helps.