IBM i 7.1 Archives

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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IBM i Roadmap Promises A Long Ride, Few Bumps

June 10, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It would be hard to find a group of enterprise IT shops that are more conservative – meaning averse to risk – than the IBM midrange. Arguably, IBM System z mainframe shops are even more risk averse, but perhaps it is a matter more of scale than degree. In the average IBM i shop, one person – or maybe a handful of people – is keeping risk at bay, while in a mainframe shop there could be dozens or hundreds that are trying to steer the ship without rocking the boat.

Every now and then, Big Blue publishes an IBM …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 18

May 6, 2019 Doug Bidwell

In this iteration of the IBM i PTF Guide, you will find that there is a new set of PTF patches for the TCP/IP Group for both IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3, and also new HIPER and Security Groups for the big three current release, which are of course IBM i 7.1, IBM i 7.2, and IBM i 7.3. IBM i 7.4 won’t be here until the AS/400’s 31st birthday on June 21.

Here are the new or updated links in the Guide this week:
- System IBM i Home Page
- System IBM i License Topics
- Open Source Midnight
…
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Going Off IBM Hardware Maintenance A Risky Move

April 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

Organizations that are running older Power Systems servers have some tough decisions coming up. IBM ceased offering hardware support for Power 6 servers on March 31, and support for Power 7 will go away on September 30. Some organizations may choose to support themselves instead of upgrading to a newer machine, but that move comes with substantial risks.

While there’s no central clearinghouse for this sort of information, it would appear that a good percentage of IBM i customers – if not most of them – have hardware and software support agreements with IBM. Big Blue provides three years …
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The IBM i Base Did Indeed Move On Up

January 21, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

This time last year, in the wake of the 2018 IBM i Marketplace Survey report put together by HelpSystems and based on survey data gathered in the fall of 2017, we said that the IBM i base was ready to move on up to newer iron. And guess what? Based on the results of the survey done in October 2018 and released in the 2019 IBM i Marketplace Survey unveiled last week, it looks like a pretty healthy portion of the base did in fact get off older iron and move to shiny new Power9 iron. In some cases …
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IBM Patches Samba Vulnerabilities In IBM i

April 16, 2018 Alex Woodie

Big Blue has issued two patches for serious flaws in IBM i’s implementation of Samba, flaws that could result in an attacker launching a denial of service attack or changing user’s passwords. The company patched IBM i 7.2 and 7.3, as support for IBM i 7.1 wanes.

On April 3, IBM published a security bulletin informing users of the existence of two flaws in IBM i, as well as the existence of two program temporary fixes (PTFs) to patch the problems. Both of the flaws involve Samba, a free and open source implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol to provide interoperability …
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GDPR Deadline Looms for IBM i Shops

February 26, 2018 Alex Woodie

Have you seen the website with the Grim Reaper counting down the days when support for IBM i 7.1 will end? There are 63 days left, if you’re keeping track. But a scant 25 days after IBM stops supporting IBM i 7.1 on April 30, time will be up for another important IT milestone: compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The GDPR is a major new data privacy and protection law that goes into effect on May 25. It was passed two years ago by the European Commission with the goal of standardizing the wide assortment of laws …
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2017: An IBM i Year In Review

December 13, 2017 Alex Woodie

It’s mid-December, which means it’s time to look back upon 2017 and reminisce on the biggest stories of the year for IBM i and the overall midrange community. From a pair of Technology Refreshes and the scheduled demise of IBM i 7.1 to acquisitions and security breaches, there was a lot to take in.

It all started off innocently enough in…

January

IBM has had a good run of not changing the name of the platform. In fact, it hadn’t changed the name since 2008, giving it a line of uninterrupted starts that even Giants quarterback Eli Manning could appreciate. …
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