• 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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• 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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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Number 37

  September 23, 2024 Doug Bidwell

  This week, there are recommended fixes for the cryptographic services in the IBM i platform and Big Blue’s own cryptographic co-processors, which run encryption, decryption, and hashing algorithms on outboard compute engines rather than on the Power CPUs at the heart of the system. You can read about the recommended fixes for IBM i 7.2 here and for IBM i 7.3 there. As far as we know, there are not fixes for IBM i 7.4 or IBM i 7.5.

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

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • HIPERs

  …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Number 8

  February 26, 2024 Doug Bidwell

  It is a rare week when there is not some sort of security bulletin that affects all of the major operating systems, and this week is not one of those rare weeks. There are three security vulnerabilities affecting the current IBM i releases as well as a group of security patches for the vintage IBM i 7.2 release. Let’s get started with the security vulnerabilities, as is our common practice.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: Multiple Vulnerabilities in IBM Java SDK affect IBM WebSphere Application Server and IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty due to January 2024 CPU, which you can …

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• Dynatrace Includes IBM i In Its Observability Bubble

  February 14, 2024 Alex Woodie

  If you’re looking for an observability tool that supports IBM i, you might want to consider Dynatrace. At first blush, you might suspect the application performance management (APM) experts at Dynatrace have better things to do than to support a proprietary midrange server used viewed as niche by the computing public. But in fact, Dynatrace appears to have devoted substantial resources to supporting the IBM i platform.

  Dynatrace is best known for providing enterprise-level APM tools that track down performance issues in complex, multi-tiered applications that involve multiple operating systems, hypervisors, databases, application servers, and sundry other enterprise computing kit. …

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• The State Of The Power Systems Base 2024: The Operating Systems

  February 12, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What stays in the field longer? The hardware or the software? Well, if you are talking about the IBM i installed base, or indeed that of any legacy systems out there like z/OS or Windows Server, the hardware can often be upgraded easier than the software and so it tends to not stay in the field as long. On average, of course.

  In the real world, it all comes down to specifics. And you have to analyze and interpret the trend lines very carefully so as to not jump to the wrong conclusions.

  So it is with the decade long …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Number 3

  January 22, 2024 Doug Bidwell

  Earlier last week, we reported on HIPER and security patches for the relatively ancient IBM i 7.2, which has long since been off standard and now extended maintenance. Now there is another patch for IBM i 7.2, which we found out about this past weekend.

  To review, in Number 2 of the IBM i PTF Guide for 2024, there was an IBM i 7.2 Group HIPER, level 240, which is SF99719 and which you can find out more about here, and an IBM i 7.2 Group Security, level 128, which is SF99718 and which you can find out more …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 49

  December 6, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome back to having to worry about security vulnerabilities and PTF patches. This week, there are two security vulnerabilities, a set of patches for IBM i 7.2, and HIPERS for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5 – among other things. Let’s do the vulnerabilities to start.

  First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM Java SDK and IBM Java Runtime for IBM i are vulnerable to a remote attacker causing integrity impacts due to the libraries component (CVE-2023-22049), which you can find out more about here. The IBM i PTF Group numbers contain the fix for the vulnerability. Future PTF …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 41

  October 9, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Here is something interesting. There is a new cume for IBM i 7.3, just after it goes out of standard support and is now on extended support. For years, we have been after IBM to put a cume out when it stops supporting a release, kind of a summation at end of life. This is the first time Big Blue has managed to do that.

  It is likely a coincidence, but it should have always been policy. It is difficult to round up docs and PTFs for an end of life product two years after the fact. Having a stake …

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• Guru: Retrieving The Long And Short Object Name

  August 14, 2023 Bob Cozzi

  Many releases ago, IBM i received “Long SQL Names” for files and libraries. These new longer names (up to 128 characters) were well received by SQL enthusiasts, but largely ignored by the mainstream IBM i developer. As each version of IBM i emerged, more and more shops experienced one or more objects with a longer-than-10-character name.

  Recently I created a file named BOAT_TRAFFIC. This name is clearly longer than 10 characters. I used SQL DDL (the CREATE or REPLACE TABLE statement) to create the file. Using SQL DDL is the only real way to create an object with a long …

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