IBM i 7.1 Archives

Paving The Road Ahead For A Better Ride

January 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We always sit behind the wheel of the present as we drive to the future with our baggage from the past in the trunk.

It is with this in mind that we contemplate 2021 and the uncertainty of regional, national, and global economies as well as how the coronavirus pandemic will be handled around the world in some pretty tricky political climates. These forces will affect all IBM i customers, of course, and we are not so much interested in describing all of these complex turbulences as they intertwine. What we do want to do is provide a few ideas …
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Some Confusion Around IBM i 7.1 And IBM i 7.2 Support

December 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the wake of writing last week’s discussion about how Big Blue would be supporting the IBM i operating system, database, and systems software stack out to 2032 and beyond, I discovered some anomalies in the documentation that IBM has put out regarding extended support for specific IBM i releases.

For many customers, getting beyond IBM i 7.1 is impossible for various reasons, which we have discussed in the past. Some of the reasons are technical – customers have lost their source code and they can’t tweak it to run on more modern releases of hardware and software, or their …
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To 2032 . . . And Beyond!

December 7, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As you sit here in 2020, can you even imagine 2032? Can you imagine beyond that? Oddly enough, I can imagine three or four decades out from here a lot more easily than I can do a dozen years, even though I know the error bars get longer and the probabilistic clouds get fuzzier the further into the future you wander with your mind. So what does it mean, really, when Big Blue commits to support the IBM i platform at least until 2032, a mere dozen years away in a platform that, depending on how you want to …
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Big Blue Revives IBM i 7.1 With Power9 Support

November 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We don’t get surprises very often in the Power Systems market, and even fewer in the IBM i sub-market. But last week, we did get a surprise – and it was a pleasant one – as Big Blue decided that it was going to allow for IBM i 7.1, which has long since been removed from marketing and which was just recently given extended extended support through April 2023, to run on selected models of the Power Systems line using Power9 processors.

That IBM would allow for this is remarkable, and it shows the economic and technical difficulties that many …
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The Fall Technology Refreshes Are Almost Here

October 5, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There has been a spring-fall rhythm to the cadence of software updates for along time, but the creation of the OpenStack cloud controller by NASA and Rackspace Hosting really snapped the commercial Linux distros into an April and October cycle of commercial rollups. And so, after many years of Technology Refreshes that follow the same rhythm, we come to expect updates to IBM i about now.

And starting tomorrow, IBM will be rolling out the fall Technology Refreshes for the current releases. That would be IBM i 7.3 TR9 and IBM i 7.4 TR3. And these, unlike those partial Technology …
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IBM Further Extends Service Extension For IBM i 7.1

October 5, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Some operating system releases are like Clint Eastwood, and some are like George Burns. And, may Clint Eastwood make it to 100 like George Burns did, now that we think about it. (He’s 9/10ths of the way there.) We don’t mind the word “legacy” as much as some folks, and use the term “vintage” and “heritage” to express the idea less pejoratively and without the negative connotations and baggage.

I don’t go on LinkedIn all that often, and usually only to connect with people I want to interview or have interviewed, but last week when I logged in, I saw …
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Kisco Extends Two Factor Authentication To Green Screens

July 27, 2020 Alex Woodie

Companies that still rely on 5250 greenscreens to get work done can now lock down those sessions with a new two-factor authentication feature recently delivered in Kisco Information Systems’ i2Pass offering. The New York company is also giving customers of its iEventMonitor solution new capabilities to automatically respond to error messages in a remote fashion.

Green screens, if you haven’t noticed, are not going away. Despite the ubiquity of Web and mobile interfaces for new development, there’s a large number of applications that require users to log into a 5250 terminal emulation session to get the job done. For companies …
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Big Power8 Iron Gets A Reprieve, And More Power To You

October 28, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The big Power9 iron has been in the field for more than a year now, and IBM had every intention of removing the Power8-based Power E870C and Power E880 E880C from its product catalog by Halloween, and said as much on February 26 this year in an announcement that we covered about a slew of withdrawals for the Power Systems platform.

In announcement 119-078, dated October 22, IBM has decided to keep the For Sale signs up on the eight-socket Power E870C and 16-socket Power E880C machines for an extra two months, and now you will be able …
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You’ve Still Got Friends In High Places

September 23, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

For the past 25 years, and across a total of 78 meetings over that time, the Large User Group, or LUG as it is known, has been helping Big Blue keep the AS/400 and IBM i platform on the right track for the very large enterprises that have the system as their platform for running the mission critical applications that are at the heart of the business. The LUG has put forward thousands of requirements to IBM – both things that the organization wants IBM to do and other things that it wants IBM to stop doing – and …
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IBM i 7.2 End Dates Revealed as Power7 Shutdown Looms

September 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

IBM surprised nobody last week when it announced that it will stop selling IBM i 7.2 next April and cease supporting the operating system a year later. The lead time should give IBM i shops plenty of runway to prepare their upgrade strategies and transition to newer versions of the operating system. A potentially more impactful deadline for those not paying close attention is the end of hardware support for Power7 boxes in less than two weeks.

Last week’s announcement of end of sales and support for IBM i 7.2 and related software products was not unexpected. That’s because IBM …
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