• Steve Will Lifts the Curtain On “Major IBM i Announcement,” But Just A Smidge

  March 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

  If you haven’t heard yet, here it is: IBM is planning to make a major IBM i announcement soon. IBM i chief architect Steve Will said as much during his recent IBM i Guided Tour. While Will shared a general outline of what IBM has in mind for the major announcement, specifics still are few and far between.

  Will, who also holds the titles of IBM i CTO and IBM distinguished engineer, teased the IBM i community with his one-hour February 12 presentation, which is titled IBM i in 2025 – A Strategic Preview. You can access a recording …

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• Coming To You Live In A Datacenter Very Near You, Or One Far Away, Too

  February 24, 2025 Ash Giddings

  We are at a pivotal moment in IBM i history regarding migration options. Public cloud solutions like IBM Power Virtual Server and Skytap on Azure have matured to the point where they are now viable for production workloads, shedding the novelty value that surrounded them during the era which coincided with the launch of IBM’s Power9 machines, to a lesser extent, Power10 iron.

  Additionally, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) worldwide are well equipped with Power10 hardware and the expertise to support both migrations and ongoing operations. Furthermore, on-premise Power10 delivers impressive price-to-performance benefits, with Power11 poised to raise the bar even …

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• State Of The Power Systems Base 2025: The Operating Systems

  February 10, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What is more important: Keeping a server platform current or keeping its operating system current?

  That is a trick question, and it is tricky in two ways. First, you should keep both hardware and software current, or more precisely, keep both as current as the applications, the budget, and good sense permits. A server older than five years is going to start having component failure (usually with the disk drives and fans), and one that is 10years old has the chance of a much more catastrophic failure. However, with a machine that is five to ten years old, you can …

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• Dell And Big Blue Call It Quits On Storage Driver Support For IBM i

  December 9, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It looks like IBM and sometime rival Dell Technologies are having a tiff over the licensing of technology that allows disk arrays descended from the venerable Symmetrix arrays created by EMC more than three decades ago to link to descendants of the AS/400 platform and OS/400 operating systems created three and a half decades ago.

  The fallout from what we presume is that a technology licensing fee agreement between Dell and IBM is similar, we think, to the one between IBM and the company that owns Information Builders. In October 2023, out of the blue, IBM announced that it was …

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• 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 …

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• IBM Bolsters Db2 for i With Tech Refreshes

  October 23, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM is delivering a handful of new database capabilities with the latest batch of Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.5 and 7.4, including new function to create Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs), new capabilities for the security data mart, and various enhancements to SQL-based IBM i Services.

  A UUID is a random 36-character, 128-bit alphanumeric string that can be used to identify something, such as a row or table in a database, with near certainty that the identifier is unique, has never been used before, and will never be used again.

  The UUID system was first implemented by the Open Software …

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• 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 …

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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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• How Managed Service Providers De-Risk Technologies For Customers

  August 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you run your own IT shop, you can only absorb new techniques and technologies as fast as your people can learn about them. Managed service providers, on the other hand, generally have a higher level of expertise and they spread the cost of learning about and investing in new technologies across hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of customers, and they can develop expertise across different solutions, targeting various industries and use cases.

  But perhaps more importantly, MSPs take the risk out of you trying something new, which makes it far more likely for you to deploy technologies …

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• IBM Kills Off Fax/400, But Alternatives Are Available

  August 19, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM will cease supporting Facsimile Support for i, commonly known as Fax/400, with the next release of the IBM i operating system, it announced last month. That tees up an opportunity for third-party vendors like Fresche Solutions and others to fill the void for a communication technology that is still used by businesses.

  The IBM Facsimile Support for i (5798-FAX) product was not among the group of 16 IBM i products that IBM initially withdrew from sales and support with its discontinuance of support letter back on May 7, the same day that it announced the latest technology refreshes (TRs) …

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