• Not April Fools: More Price Increases For Power Systems Coming

  March 10, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is at it again, raising prices for parts of the Power Systems stack and related hardware and software technologies often used with the platform.

  In announcement letter AD25-0860, which came out on March 3, Big Blue raised prices on various Power Systems and storage products and across various geographic regions.

  Another part of the price change was to rebalance against the U.S. dollar foreign exchange rate. IBM did a similar price harmonization across geographies in November 2011, and then did it again on September 3. In the latest announcement, eighteen different currencies in the Asia/Pacific and EMEA regions …

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• What The Marketplace Study Says About IBM i Migrations And Outlook

  March 10, 2025 Alex Woodie

  One of the values that Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Survey brings to the table is to function as a forward-looking indicator. If something is stirring in the IBM i installed base – say, that a large chunk is looking to mosey off the platform – then it likely will appear in the data. So when we analyze the data from the 2025 report, that’s something worth looking for.

  The good news from the 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey results is that there’s nothing to indicate any mass migrations are under way. Companies will always come and go on IBM …

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• Guru: AI Pair Programming In RPG With Continue

  March 10, 2025 Gregory Simmons

  In my last article, I shared a brief introduction to the GitHub Copilot extensions. These extensions provide an easy way to get up and running with an AI coding assistant to aid you in your RPG development. Being cloud based, it’s lightweight in terms of system resources, but it does cost a little money per month, per user.

  For this article, I would like to share with you what I have learned about a newer extension for VS Code named Continue. Continue runs locally on your PC, is 100 percent free, and as of this writing, is the leading …

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• Rocket CDC Tool Pushes Data Out Of IBM i

  March 10, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that need a change data capture (CDC) tool to push Db2 data off the box onto a target system, such as an Apache Kafka stream, may want to check out the new DataEdge product that Rocket Software recently announced.

  In late January, Rocket Software unveiled DataEdge, a new suite that provides a spectrum of data integration, data discovery, and data virtualization capabilities under the specific product names Rocket Data Replicate & Sync, Rocket Data Intelligence, and Rocket Data Virtualization. Some of the components in DataEdge are preexisting, while others – such as the outbound IBM i CDC …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 10

  March 10, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  There are new PTF group updates for the current releases of IBM i – that would be 7.3, 7.4, and 7.5 – but not much in the way of the occasional weirdness we see in the software stack or the never-ending stream of security vulnerabilities. Take it while you can get it. . . .

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

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Security
  • IBM MQ for IBM i – v9.2.0/v9.3.0
  • PowerHA Tools for IBM i – Full System FlashCopy (FSFC)
  • PowerHA Tools for IBM i

  …

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• Steve Will Lifts the Curtain On “Major IBM i Announcement,” But Just A Smidge

  March 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

  If you haven’t heard yet, here it is: IBM is planning to make a major IBM i announcement soon. IBM i chief architect Steve Will said as much during his recent IBM i Guided Tour. While Will shared a general outline of what IBM has in mind for the major announcement, specifics still are few and far between.

  Will, who also holds the titles of IBM i CTO and IBM distinguished engineer, teased the IBM i community with his one-hour February 12 presentation, which is titled IBM i in 2025 – A Strategic Preview. You can access a recording …

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• IBM Pushes FlashSystem Costs Down To Nearline Disk Storage

  March 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If flash storage is ever going to replace disk storage, and there are good reasons to believe that at some point it will, this will happen because flash becomes normal and offers a mix of technical and economic reasons why it is worth a small premium – not a huge one, mind you – compared to buy dirt cheap spinning rust.

  IBM’s new FlashSystem C200, which debuted last week in announcement letter AD25-0017, might be just the thing that small and medium Power Systems customers have been waiting for.

  It has been a dozen years since IBM bought flash …

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• Guru: Avoiding Land Mines During A Role Swap

  March 3, 2025 Steven McIver

  Having a disaster recovery plan is crucial for many businesses running on IBM i. The data that resides on these systems is often mission critical to the business. Implementing a strategy for disaster recovery is tough. Planning and actually executing on the strategy is even tougher.

  Even with excellent planning, role swap tests to a designated disaster recovery machine can many times fall short due to unforeseen circumstances that force an immediate role swap back to the production site. In this article, I’ve compiled a few of those land mines to look out for to help ensure a successful swap …

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• Need Data Off An Old Tape? The Backup Crackers Can Help

  March 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

  What happens when you need data from an old backup tape, but no longer have the vintage IBM hardware it was backed up from, let alone a subscription to the application it was created from nor the backup software it was created with? If you find yourself in such a predicament, the folks at S2|Data would like to hear from you.

  “We are backup software format crackers,” says Brendan Sullivan, the founder and chief executive officer of S2|Data. “What we do is we look at the media, which might be tape or it might be disk, and we figure …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 9

  March 3, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  If you are using Rational Developer for i to create applications and your company uses the Singularity endpoint manager from SentinelOne, then you might be having an issue.

  According to this notice from IBM, after updating Windows 11 to 24H2, Rational Developer for i 9.8.0.3 may be ended abruptly by SentinelOne. IBM adds: “There may be a Java dialogue left showing “Java was started but returned exit code=-1073741571” and the Windows event viewer will show that the problem happened in ntdll.dll.” The temporary workaround is to revert to Windows 11 23H2 or whitelist RDI in SentinelOne until IBM figures …

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