• The Power Systems Base Is A Little Less Rusty

  February 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Another three years, and another upgrade cycle that can bring about the modernizing of the Power Systems iron that supports the IBM i customer base. Or, more precisely, another four distinct upgrade cycles that customers are on as they move off legacy iron to something more current than what they have.

  What we mean by this is that some customers are stuck on older releases because they are cheapskates by necessity or they have applications that can only run on older releases like OS/400 V5R3, i5/OS 5.4, or IBM i 6.1. Others are stuck on IBM i 7.1. Or IBM …

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• IBM i Subscription Pricing Comes To All Power9 And Power10 Iron

  February 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has been gradually “cloudifying” the packaging and pricing of its Power Systems hardware and IBM i software stack as an alternative to buying hardware outright and acquiring perpetual licenses to the operating system and pay Software Maintenance. Subscription-based pricing came to hardware and software for the Power10-based Power S1014 server running IBM i 7.5 last year, and now IBM i subscription pricing is more widely available.

  As outlined in announcement letter 223-030 on Valentine’s Day last week, IBM i subscription pricing is now available on all Power9 and Power10 servers, top to bottom, and on the four current …

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• Finally, IBM i Cloud Dev Instances That Are Powerful And Cheap

  October 24, 2022 Chuck Paolillo

  Back in the old days, when IBM had relatively inexpensive entry AS/400 and iSeries machines and was willing to lease them at special low rates to developers, it was possible for software houses and independent code slingers to get their hands on machinery to create and modify applications. Those days are long gone, and it has been very difficult to replace that cheap and usable functionality in the marketplace.

  With Windows Server and Linux platforms, things are a lot easier because developers can create a variant of their X86 server environment right on their desktops or laptops, and if need …

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• IBM i 7.3 Loses Standard Support On September 30, 2023

  October 3, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue just got the IBM i 7.5 operating system and system software stack out the door for Power9 and Power10 machines back in May, and from that moment the clock was ticking on regular support for the IBM i release that came out in April 2016 and that represents the second most popular release on primary machines based on data from the most recent IBM i Marketplace Survey.

  Most operating system makers – there are not that many of them left in the datacenter these days – offer standard support for their releases and versions for seven years …

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• IBM Rejiggers RPM Repos for Open Source Software

  September 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM has made a change to how it distributes open source software for the IBM i platform. Instead of using a single RPM repository to distribute the software for all release of the IBM i operating system, as has been the case for the past five years, IBM is now delivering software through operating system-specific releases. The change was made to address difficulties that have arisen in the use of a single repo for all releases of IBM i, the company says.

  IBM rolled out its new RPM (which stands for Red Hat Package Manager) back in 2018 as a …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 33

  August 15, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  First up, IBM has tweaked its temporary additional use policy for Power Systems software for migrations to Power E1080, Power E1050, and Power S1024 servers. You can read about it here.

  Here is the significance of this. When you do an upgrade, you get 70 days from install to use the systems software for free. That can be extended once for 40 days, and then that can be extended again, once, for 3 days. After that, you have to beg for more if you need more time to do the upgrade. IBM doesn’t care about partitions, it’s the host …

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• More IBM i Security Flaws Revealed

  July 13, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The summer slowdown might have started in your particular business, but things are just getting warmed up IBM security researchers, who disclosed a series of new vulnerabilities across IBM i products over the past couple of weeks, including IBM i Merlin, WAS Liberty, OpenSSL, the Digital Certificate Manager, and Zlib.

  On June 27, IBM disclosed that the collection of open source and proprietary tools and technology it’s brought together as IBM i Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration (Merlin) suffers from no fewer than 16 separate security flaws.

  Among the most series of these flaws is a CVE-2022-22965, a data binding …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 22

  June 1, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  Well, there is a lot of stuff going on with IBM i PTFs this week, with cumulative patch rollups, or Cumes as we call them, Technology Refreshes, and other goodies. Specifically, IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.2 have Cume rollups, as well as their respective TR6 and TR12 updates of new functionality.

  There are also two new security vulnerabilities. First, there is Security Bulletin: IBM Navigator for i is vulnerable to an SQL injection (CVE-2022-22495), which you can read about at this link. The patches for this vulnerability are as follows:

  IBM i Release	HTTP Server for i 

  …

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• IBM Accelerates New Nav Development Following Log4j Issue

  February 23, 2022 Alex Woodie

  When IBM launched the new version of Navigator for i last fall, executives figured they had time to fill out the new product’s functionality as customers gradually adopted it. But those plans were upended when Log4j rendered the old version vulnerable to a serious security flaw, and now IBM finds itself needing to accelerate the build out of New Nav while simultaneously ramping up promotion and outreach.

  IBM launched the new version of Navigator for i back in September 2021, when it announced the latest Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4. New Nav, as the product …

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• The State Of The IBM i Base 2022, Part Two: Upgrade Plans

  February 23, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is always good for the IBM i ecosystem when there are new machines on the horizon with new processors, a lot more performance, and much better bang for the buck. This is, in many ways, what has drive the System/3X, AS/400, and IBM i midrange business forward for more than four decades.

  But you have to admit, the kind of excitement that we used to have in the early years of the AS/400, when performance needs often outstripped what Big Blue – and indeed, any system supplier – could afford, is not prevalent in the IBM i base today. …

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