• Plotting Out Power Systems And IBM i To 2040 And Beyond

  April 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may be hard to believe, but with the launch of IBM i 7.6 today, it has been 13,440 days since OS/400 V1R1 was announced on June 21, 1988, and Big Blue has delivered 27 distinct releases of the OS/400 and IBM i platform with dozens of Technology Refresh interim updates between releases in the IBM i 7.X series.

  It took nearly three years to go from OS/400 V1R1 to OS/400 V2R1, and there were no interim releases and Technology Refreshes were not going to be invented for a long time. With the V2 series, hardware and software releases in …

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

  April 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue today announced IBM i 7.6, the first new release of the operating system in three years. While version 7.6 brings a range of enhancements, arguably the biggest new feature is the addition of multi-factor authentication directly into the operating system, which will make adopting MFA simple and represent a “massive security improvement” at no additional cost to IBM i shops, the IBM i security architect said.

  MFA has emerged as an industry requirement to improve security and prevent unauthorized access to applications and data. Most North American banks require customers to enter additional codes that are texted or …

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• Oft-Requested SQL Function Coming In IBM i 7.6

  April 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i engineers and product managers have no shortage of feature requests to wade through, some of which make it into the platform and many of which do not. With the upcoming delivery of IBM i 7.6, IBM will be delivering one of the most often requested features: Support for UPDATE and DELETE statements in the data-change-table-reference clause of a SQL statement.

  While the capability to update and delete statements with data-change-table-reference may not sound like a big deal, it actually represents a significant improvement that will simplify database programming tasks for developers, according to Scott Forstie, IBM’s Db2 for …

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• IBM Buys Snowflake Expert Hakkoda To Speed Data Modernization For AI

  April 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The company may be best known for selling systems and software, but IBM still has a pretty large consultancy and services business even after spinning off a lot of outsource and hosting businesses as Kyndryl several years ago. Expertise is important to any consultancy, which means having the knowledge about how to solve pesky problems that can be applied to many clients, speeding up their projects and bolstering IBM’s revenues and profits.

  That, in a nutshell, is what IBM’s acquisition of Hakkoda, consultancy founded as a partner to help IT shops move to Snowflake, the cloudy data warehouse system provider, …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 14

  April 8, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  If you need a little something to wake you up, or a little night reading before you  drift off to sleep, check out the Known Issues And Fix Information database at Big Blue for the IBM platform, which you can see here. The IBM i PTF Guide is meant to save you from having to be familiar with this, of course. But it can’t hurt to be aware of this database.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last published:

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Java
  • Backup Recovery Solutions
  • Content Manager

  …

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• The Top Ten IBM i Requests From The IBM Ideas Portal

  April 2, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue is gearing up for a major new release of the IBM i operating system. We don’t know yet what will be in the release, but we can forge some guesses by checking out what new features the IBM i community is requesting through the IBM Ideas portal, and how IBM reacts to them.

  IBM prides itself on being a customer-focused organization, and so it looks to the IBM i community for direction on what sort of features, capabilities, and fixes the IBM i community currently is looking for. That community outreach takes various forms, including the COMMON Americas …

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• What’s New With IBM PowerVS In 2025?

  April 2, 2025 Alex Woodie

  It has been six years since IBM launched IBM Power Virtual Server, its public cloud offering for IBM i workloads. Adoption started slowly but has picked up in recent years as IBM fleshed out the offering and expanded it to more datacenters. As we enter the second quarter, IBM is banking on several new features to help it attract more IBM i customers to PowerVS.

  Last October, IBM offered PowerVS in 21 IBM Cloud datacenters around the world, including 650 Power Systems customers. Doris Conti, the vice president of Power Systems product management, told The Four Hundred that IBM had …

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• Maybe It Was April Fools In Some Cases: Price Cuts For Selected Power Systems

  April 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What goes up sometimes comes back down again. We have been chronicling the successive price increases that IBM has been levying on Power Systems, storage, and various software and services products throughput 2024 and into early 2025 to help you keep track of it all. And now, we have an actual price decrease in selected areas.

  Don’t get too excited. It probably does not apply to you, and the four cumulative and multiplicative broad price increases we have seen in the past year almost certainly still do.

  To recap: IBM raised prices in April 2024, then in September 2024 …

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• Picking Apart An Ebullient GenAI Spending Forecast

  April 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In one of the big ironies of our time, companies are embedding AI acceleration functions into PCs that most consumers do not actively want while at the same time datacenter operators (be they captive or independent) are actively trying to get AI compute engines (mostly Nvidia and sometimes AMD GPUs) so they can train their GenAI and other machine learning models – and they can’t get enough of these accelerated servers.

  Because a lot of PCs are already enhanced with AI functions, more and more PCs are falling under the label of an “AI PC,” and therefore the market for …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 13

  April 2, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  Good day, good people of IBM i Land. This week we start out with two security vulnerabilities and a known issue to beware of the BLOB!

  Let’s start with the security vulnerabilities.

  First we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty is vulnerable to a denial of service due to Netty (CVE-2025-25193), which you can find out more about at this link. IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty versions 21.0.0.2 through 25.0.0.3 are affected.

  Second, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty is vulnerable to a denial of service due to Apache CXF (CVE-2025-23184), and here is …

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