Sundry Interesting IBM i Announcements For You To Ponder

April 23, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We are still picking though the latest tweaks and changes to the IBM i platform that came with the April 8 announcements. We are still also working through our disappointment that there was not one single interesting hardware announcement from Big Blue relating to the Power Systems platform. We are having a bit of iron deficiency, it seems.

First thing first, we noticed this week that the official Redbook for IBM i 7.6, which naturally enough is called IBM i 7.6 Features And Functions, has been published, and is jam packed with 215 pages of more details about what is in the latest release. In that, we note a bunch of licensed program products, or LPPs in the IBM lingo, that are no longer supported with IBM i 7.6:

• IBM Rational Application Management Toolset for i (5770-AMT)
• IBM Backup, Recovery and Media Services (BRMS) for i (5770-BR1)
• BRMS for i Subscription (5770-BR2) is available with IBM i 7.6 as separately ordered
• Communications Utilities for System i (5761-CM1)
• IBM System/38 Utilities for i (5761-DB1)
• IBM CICS Transaction Server for i (5770-DFH)
• IBM Business Graphics Utility for i (5761-DS2)
• IBM Facsimile Support for i (5798-FAX)
• IBM Universal Manageability Enablement for i (5770-UME)
• IBM Web Enablement for i5/OS (5722-WE2)– IBM i Access for Web (5770-XH2)
• IBM XML Toolkit for i (5733-XT2)

It is weird to see the System/38 emulation environment being removed from the platform, and ditto for the CICS Transaction Server, which is a key component of porting mainframe applications to the IBM i on Power Systems platform.

Elsewhere, you will see in the IBM Software Support pages that Java 21 was releases on IBM i 7.6 as Option 21 of 5770-JV1 on April 18. Java Development Kit 21 is, of course, the latest Long Term Support (LTS) release of Java SE from Oracle, which has versions available for Arm and X86 server platforms running Linux and MacOS and X86 machines running Windows and Windows Server. IBM has the rights to make tweaks to support JDK 21 on IBM i and AIX (and we are not entirely sure if the JDK is running on the PASE AIX runtime inside of IBM i or not). The most advanced Java available from Oracle is JDK 24, which is not an LTS release and which is probably not something a lot of IBM i shops would want to mess around with anyway.

In the IBM i 7.4 launch, which is in announcement letter AD25-0031, we found this statement of direction at the bottom: “IBM intends to offer Full System Replication automation and Full System FlashCopy orchestration capabilities as a product option in PowerHA SystemMirror for i via IBM Power Virtual Server and on-premise.”

Well, that sounds interesting and useful. We will keep an eye out for it.

Also in the IBM Software Support pages, we have seen that Big Blue is now going to require an IBM identification (IBMid) that has proper entitlement to software so that customers can view support troubleshooting, question and answer and how-to documents on the site. These were previously openly available on the IBM website, specifically through the IBM Customer Support Console and reachable by external search engines. Product documentation and news will still be openly available, however. There are several dozen programs, many of them for the IBM i platform, that are now going behind a paywall. (You pay for the system, you get the data.)

RELATED STORIES

IBM i 7.6 Brings More Security Improvements Than Just MFA

IBM i 7.6 Delivers “Massive Security Improvement” With Built-In MFA

Oft-Requested SQL Function Coming In IBM i 7.6