• 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 …

  Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Number 45

  December 2, 2024 Doug Bidwell

  It was pretty quiet in PTF Land just after The Four Hundred went on publishing hiatus, and we are still playing catch up getting out the sequential changes to the IBM i patch stack and any security vulnerabilities you may need to be aware of.

  The good news this time around is that we have not run across any security issues. So carry on, and have a look at the High Impact/Pervasive (HIPER) and security patches that have been put out for IBM i 7.3, IBM i 7.4, and IBM i 7.5.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by …

  Read more

• Private PowerVS Pods Now Available For On-Premises Power10 Iron

  October 7, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The number of system vendors that also run clouds, or cloud vendors that also sell systems, is very small because doing both is exceedingly capital intensive – one for research and development, and the other for acquiring gear and deploying it so its capacity can be rented to others.

  Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the two biggest server OEMs in the world, both tried to build clouds and failed, and so did VMware now that we think about it. Oracle bought its way into the systems business with its 2009 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and while it no longer …

  Read more

• 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

  …

  Read more

• Big Blue Offers Managed Services For PowerVS Private Cloud Pods

  May 22, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are lots of ways to skin the cloud infrastructure cat. You can rent cloudy capacity and manage it yourself. That is called Power Virtual Server. You can buy your own virtualized Power Systems servers and manage them with the same control plane as is used for the PowerVS cloud. That is called Power Virtual Server Private Cloud, of PowerVS Private Cloud for short. (Sort of.)

  And now, with announcement letter AD24-0420, Big Blue is offering a version of PowerVS Private Cloud that has a managed services provider layer on top of it from the company’s own …

  Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Number 7

  February 19, 2024 Doug Bidwell

  Aside from two new security vulnerabilities, it has been a pretty quiet week in IBM i PTF Land. There are some updates for the current releases of IBM i – that would be IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5 that are both on standard support and IBM i 7.3 that is on extended support – and of course there are some new defective PTFs that Big Blue needs to make you aware of, as often happens because all modern platforms are complex and all of them sometimes have patches that have unintended consequences.

  Let’s start with the security issues, …

  Read more

• 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. …

  Read more

• 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 …

  Read more

• IBM Patches New Security Vulns In IBM i Components, Power Firmware

  February 12, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM has patched a series of moderate security vulnerabilities in IBM i products and Power firmware over the past two weeks. The IBM i flaws span Rational Developer for i (RDi), Access Client Solutions (ACS), and the Java development kit and runtime, while the Power flaw involves PowerVM and its communications with the Hardware Management Console (HMC).

  Concerns over security hit an all-time high in the IBM i community according to the IBM i Marketplace 2024 study conducted by Fortra. The survey found that 79 percent of IBM i professionals considered security a top concern, a 10 percent increase …

  Read more

• Hey, Where Did All Of The IBM i Redbooks Go?

  February 7, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Have you read any good IBM i Redbooks lately? Probably not, and we want to know why.

  Our intrepid colleague, Doug Bidwell, of IBM i PTF Guide fame among many other things, pointed out to us this week that it has been a long, long time since we have seen a Redbook or even a Redpaper concerning the IBM i platform. This seems peculiar to us, considering all of the new features and functions that have gone into IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5. And even IBM i 7.3, which is going the way of all flesh.

  If you …

  Read more

Previous Articles