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  • Reading The IBM i Tea Leaves For 2020

    January 6, 2020 Alex Woodie

    When the calendar flipped over from 2019 last week, the IBM i platform began its fifth decade, an amazing feat of longevity in our current age of punctuated technological equilibrium. As we set out to foresee what may become of IBM i in 2020, we have a couple of avenues we can take.

    On the one hand, we can try to guess what sorts of moves IBM will make with the platform. IBM isn’t in the habit of telegraphing its moves too far in advance, so this would be an act of speculation. On the other hand, we can look to the recent past and extrapolate that into the future to give us an indication of what may happen.

    This is the approach that Pete Massiello, the president of iTech Solutions Group, took in a recent IBM i Year In Review webinar recorded in December. As an IBM business partner, Massiello is privy to what IBM is doing behind the scenes and is almost certainly under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) regarding any beta tests that IBM may have going. But he’s also a midrange veteran and a capable observer of how IBM operates, and he was able to separate those two roles when discussing IBM i likelihoods in 2020.

    “We know that Technology Refreshes are coming out, and it’s no secret when we talk about dates that the cadence has been every six months,” Massiello said in response to a question asked by his colleague, iTech Solutions account executive Laurie LeBlanc, during the webinar. “There’s no reason to believe that IBM would change that cadence, so you would expect six months from now, thereabout, we’ll see another Technology Refresh. That will have things for 7.3 and 7.4. No more 7.2 Technology Refreshes.”

    Pete Massiello is the president of iTech Solutions Group and the first Lifetime Champion for Power.

    IBM has stuck to a fairly regular schedule of making announcements, whether new releases of the operating system or Technology Refreshes, in April and October. Last April brought the release of IBM i version 7.4 and IBM i 7.3 TR6, while October brought the unveiling of IBM i 7.4 TR1 and 7.3 TR7. If that cadence holds – and there’s nothing to suggest that it will not – that would put us on track to see IBM i 7.4 TR2 and 7.3 TR8 in April and IBM i 7.4 TR3 and 7.3 TR9 in October.

    Massiello provided some clues as to what we might see in those releases.

    “There are some pretty cool things coming out, I know, in the next Technology Refresh, but I really can’t talk about specifics,” he said. “But I guess if we could say something, without being specific, I would say certainly look at what’s coming out in the open source world with IBM. I always think about IBM i now as being an incubator for open source languages. There are so many that are being brought to the platform, and I think you’re going to continue to see that. And I think you may even be surprised at some of the things you actually get to see ported to IBM i.”

    He also offered this prediction for IBM i shops who are currently running IBM i version 7.1, which is currently in extended support that’s slated to end on April 30, 2021.

    “My recommendation is to get off of 7.1,” he said. “The longer you stay on 7.1 the harder it is to get to 7.3 or 7.4. If you’re on 7.1 now, it doesn’t make sense to get to 7.2. You’re better off getting to 7.3.”

    When it comes to servers, Massiello had some additional advice for IBM i professionals. We’re currently in the sweet spot of the Power9 lifecycle, and IBM i is holding its own in driving Power9 sales. But the Power9 chips are so powerful that they are overkill for many smaller IBM i shops, who will likely ride their Power7+ and Power8 servers as long as possible. “Unless you’re really pushing the hell out of the machine, Power9 is going to give you plenty of performance,” Massiello said.

    Power6 and Power7 servers reached end of service on September 30, 2019, and IBM will no longer offer support for Power7+ at the end of 2020. End of support for Power8 has not yet been announced. With many folks in the IBM i community delaying hardware upgrades for so long, in some ways there’s no great rush to get to Power10. But it’s right around the corner, and IBM has a roadmap for Power11, too.

    “You’re probably talking 2021 for a Power10 chip. That’s probably a fair estimate without any knowledge of what’s coming out,” Massiello said. “Power9 is here. It gives you a great jump over Power7 [and a 50 percent performance boost] over Power8. With Power10, you’re going to see a comparable jump.”

    In the meantime, IBM faces a large number of IBM i customers who are running on unsupported hardware and unsupported versions of the operating system. Hard numbers are tough to come by, due to the nature of the situation. Suffice it to say, there are a fair number of Power5 machines still in the field, some of which are running i5/OS V5R4, such as the customer in the Northeast for whom that Massiello recently replaced failed RAM and disk drives. That’s an unacceptable risk, in his opinion.

    “You run your company on an unsupported operating system on unsupported hardware, and if something goes wrong, you’re going to be on an unsupported job,” he said, “because I certainly wouldn’t put my butt on a line for something like that.”

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    Tags: Tags: i5/OS V5R4, IBM i, Power10, Power7, Power8, Power9

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    Guru 2020: Suggested Resolutions, One Prediction Observations, Priorities, And Desires For IBM i In 2020

    3 thoughts on “Reading The IBM i Tea Leaves For 2020”

    • Francois van der Merwe says:
      January 7, 2020 at 9:11 pm

      I am a technology and open hardware/software enthusiast. I am in no way an expert but here are some of my thoughts.

      I am very interested in the desktop and even gaming implications for the OpenPower initiative. Now that the OpenPower foundation is going to become part of the Linux foundation, with the fact that IBM bought RedHat, I am excited about the proliferation of affordable OpenPower based desktop computers that run Linux.

      There are some interesting scenarios that might play out. Nvidia, which have no X86 license, might seize an opportunity and become an OperPower hardware producer complimented with its GPU technology. Nation states like China and Russia will trust the open nature of OpenPower more than other closed platforms in my opinion.

      What a dream to be able to run an affordable OpenPower based P with Linux at home, a truly open system. I hope this dream will come true.

      Reply
      • Ademeion says:
        January 27, 2020 at 6:57 pm

        Our dreams are very similar. I wish Purism would produce a PC based on Power9. Purism is a privacy, security, and freedom centered company, which so far has produced laptops and a phone. My understanding is that they are planning to produce a PC too:
        https://puri.sm/

        Reply
    • Rob Berendt says:
      January 8, 2020 at 8:00 am

      Your roadmap seems to indicate that extended support for IBM i 7.1 ends in 2020. Not that I like it going on so long but I think it goes on to 2021.
      https://www-03.ibm.com/services/supline/products/ExtendedSupport/iSeries.pdf

      Reply

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Table of Contents

  • Observations, Priorities, And Desires For IBM i In 2020
  • Reading The IBM i Tea Leaves For 2020
  • Guru 2020: Suggested Resolutions, One Prediction
  • From Integrated Systems To Disaggregated And Composable
  • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Numbers 51 And 52
  • Participate In The 2020 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webcast

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