• And Then There Were Two: Big Blue Withdraws IBM i 7.4

  September 22, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  UPDATED: If you have a compelling reason to stay on IBM i 7.4 and need a license to it for a machine, or if IBM i 7.4 is the last release you can get your applications to without a major change in that code, then you have better shake a leg. Because IBM i 7.4 is only going to be sold for a few more months.

  In announcement letter AD25-0894, which was dated September 16, Big Blue said that it would stop selling the IBM i 7.4 operating system on April 30, 2026. A bunch of other related system …

  Read more

• IBM Streamlines Data Migration With New Partition Mirror Tech

  July 28, 2025 Alex Woodie

  There is a brand new technology available for migrating data from one IBM i partition to another as part of IBM’s new Migrate While Active tool. It’s called partition mirror, and it gives IBM i shops a potentially less disruptive method for moving data across distances both long and short.

  IBM first unveiled its new Migrate While Active product in October 2024 as part of its announcement introducing subscriptions for the PowerHA high availability and Db2 Mirror continuous availability products. The co-mingling of the announcements made some sense when you consider that the original Migrate While Active product utilized a …

  Read more

• Vendors Fill In The Gaps With IBM’s New MFA Solution

  July 14, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The new multi-factor authentication (MFA) capability that IBM has built into the IBM i operating system is a real gamechanger in terms of securing the system and preventing unauthorized access to applications and data. However, it lacks some key capabilities that some customers are looking for in an MFA solution, which third-party vendors are eager to fill.

  The native MFA function that Big Blue delivered with IBM i 7.6 is being praised almost universally throughout the IBM i community as a massive security improvement. The MFA functionality, which uses randomly generated time-based one-time passwords (TOTP), is built directly into …

  Read more

• FAX/400 And CICS For i Are Dead. What Will IBM Kill Next?

  May 19, 2025 Alex Woodie

  A number of IBM i products and functions were sunsetted and are no longer supported with IBM i 7.6, including some of the greenscreen Application Development ToolSet (ADTS) tools like Screen Design Aid (SDA) and Report Layout Utility (RLU), and more than two dozen others. This shouldn’t come as news, as IBM previously announced its intent. But what products and functions will IBM kill with the next release of IBM i? A cryptic post by IBM on its website has the community talking.

  As part of the May 2024 Technology Refresh (TR) cycle for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5, Big …

  Read more

• POWERUp 2025 –Your Source For IBM i 7.6 Information

  May 12, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i community is getting ready for the biggest event of the year, the COMMON Annual Conference, better known as POWERUp 2025. The event, which is being held next week at the Disneyland Hotel in Southern California, is chock full of information relating to IBM i 7.6, the latest release of the operating system.

  It seems like just yesterday the IBM i community was convening on Fort Worth, Texas, for what would be one of the largest and most positive COMMON events in recent memory. In particular, IBM and COMMON were successful in attracting a substantial contingent of …

  Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 19

  May 12, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to this week in IBM i Land. And we will start out by warning you to watch out for the defective PTFs listing this week.

  And now, to a security bulletin and a patches to fix it and a warning about a vulnerability that has not been patched.

  First the one that has been patched, which is in Security Bulletin: IBM i is vulnerable to an authentication and authorization attack due to incorrect validation processing in IBM i Netserver [CVE-2025-3218] and which you can see more about at this link. The IBM i PTF numbers for 5770-999 contain …

  Read more

• Another Non-TR “Technology Refresh” Happens With IBM i TR6

  May 5, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As you know, Big Blue released IBM i 7.6 and IBM i 7.5 Technology Refresh 6 (TR6) on April 8, with the expectation that both would ship to customers on April 18. IBM i 7.6 was detailed in announcement letter AD25-0031 and IBM i 7.5 TR6 was revealed in announcement letter AD25-0077. We’re all good there. And many of the features in IBM i 7.6 were backcast as a refresh into IBM i 7.5 with TR6, if you read the announcement letters.

  IBM i 7.6 was available on April 18 as expected, but we know a bunch of people …

  Read more

• How IBM Improved The Database With IBM i 7.6

  April 28, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Developers have a host of new database functions to play with in IBM i 7.6 and 7.5 TR6, not the least of which is the new data change table reference functions. In addition to that big new feature, IBM is bringing updates to SELF, enhancements to parallel execution of SQL statements, and 10 new IBM i services, among others.

  The Db2 for i database is the beating heart of the IBM i platform, storing, processing, and serving data to all of the IBM i applications. While other databases are available on the platform (MySQL, MariaDB, and Postgres) through the AIX …

  Read more

• The New Capabilities IBM Added To Navigator For i

  April 23, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The addition of multi-factor authentication (MFA) to IBM i 7.6 is the big news with the recent operating system update from IBM. But IBM has introduced new capabilities to other parts of the platform as well, and some of the biggest reside in Navigator for i.

  As the strategic Web-based console for administrating the IBM i server, it’s natural that Navigator for i gets lots of attention. Whether you’re looking to monitor or manage the databases, inspect batch jobs, configure security, or monitor performance, Navigator for i is the one central place that lets you do it. You can, of …

  Read more

• One Big Time-Saving Network Enhancement In IBM i 7.6

  April 23, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i 7.6 brings a host of new enhancements around security and database development, among other areas. But IBM has also brought one big new capability to the operating system’s networking environment that will be worth the cost of an upgrade for some larger IBM i environments.

  IBM introduced Ethernet Link Aggregation support in IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh 3 (TR3), which shipped way back in 2012. Ethernet Link Aggregation enables several full-duplex Ethernet links to be grouped into a single line description with a single Media Access Control (MAC) address, which can boost reliability as well as throughput. …

  Read more

Previous Articles