The Low Down On Service Extension For IBM i 7.X Releases

March 25, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the wake of our discussion two weeks ago of the long-lived releases of IBM i and OS/400 and how they compare in terms of technical support and bug fix coverage to Linux and Windows Server, we got a bunch of questions about just when the service extension – what we call extended support like other operating system vendors – would end.

We understood the very high price that customers pay for service extension – as brilliantly outlined in a piece by Steve Pitcher back in October 2023, which showed the high price that the cumulative cost stacks up to as the years go by for these older IBM i releases. We frankly did not realize service extension was so expensive, and again thanks for that explanation, which IBM was not clear about. But many of us were unsure when service extension would end for IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3.

Doug Bidwell, our intrepid IBM i PTF bug patch tracker and IBM i techie extraordinaire, poked around and found this handy little document that lays out not only what extended support costs, but when it ends and what precisely it covers. You can download it here, and bookmark it for updates as time goes by.

As we already know, service extension for IBM i 7.3 started on October 1, 2023, for both that operating system and for PowerHA SystemMirror for i 7.2. And now we know that support goes out to September 30, 2026, which is the three years that we expected.

Service extension for IBM i 7.2 started on May 1, 2021 and was expected to run out on April 30, 2024, but it has been itself extended out to April 30, 2026. So this is technically extended extended support. (This extra stretching happened with the IBM i 7.1 release, too.) This extended extended support costs 4X whatever the cost of the base Software Maintenance is per year. The cumulate cost of having that extended extended support, by the way, is 3X whatever the cost of the base Software Maintenance is. So if you are paying $1,000 per core per year, then over six years, the way the algorithm works, you will pay $18,000 per core per year and that averages out to $3,000 per core per year. But you don’t pay an average bill, you pay each year on its own, and you will be paying $4,000 per core per year for the final three years of support.

On machines with a fair number of cores and with the real SWMA pricing, this money can add up to big bucks real fast. So you pay a lot more for maintenance and get a lot less bug fixes and support and the extended support goes on. This is fair from the point of view of the operating system, and it is a stick that is mean to drive you to keep current on your operating system because it is cheaper for an operating system maker to support a limited number of OS releases.

And just a reminder: Extended Service Extension on IBM i 7.1 for Power9 machines ends on April 30, 2024. Such support was already killed off on Power8 iron on April 30, 2022 and on Power7 and Power7+ iron on December 31, 2021.

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