• IBM Preps Delivery of 10th-Gen DS8000 Array

  October 9, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM is gearing up to begin delivery of the tenth generation of the DS8000, its high-end storage arrays for IBM i, AIX, z/OS, and other servers. Due to ship October 25, the upgraded DS8000 features a number of features designed to enhance data storage in z/OS mainframe environments, but IBM i shops will also see some benefits, too.

  Now in its 20th year, the DS8000 still roams the highest echelons of storage area networks (SAN) for large enterprises. Built with high availability and performance in mind, the DS8000 is designed to power the most important applications for the biggest companies …

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• StarWind Hooks VTL to IBM i

  March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking to add a virtual tape library (VTL) to their IT mix may want to check out StarWind, a Rocket Division Software spin-off that provides a range of storage virtualization and software-defined storage offerings. The company recently added support for IBM i with its VTL solution, opening up a new market for itself in the midrange.

  StarWind bills itself as a provider of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions for the enterprise remote office/branch office (ROBO), small and midsize business (SMB), and the edge. The company, which began in 2008 as a spin-off from Rocket Division Software …

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• Top 5 New IBM i Features to Check Out Now That Fall TRs Are GA

  December 7, 2022 Alex Woodie

  All of the new features that IBM unveiled earlier this fall with the Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5 (as well as another stealth “non-TR” TR for 7.3) are now generally available. Some of them shipped before December 2, but pretty much all of them are now GA. With so much enterprise computing goodness ready to download, what will you adopt first?

  We know it’s not Christmas yet. But with so many new features, it can be hard to figure out what to do first. While everybody has their own computing priorities, we have our own ideas for …

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• TRs Deliver Database and SQL Updates for Every IBM i User

  November 2, 2022 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to SQL services and database updates, there’s something for just about every IBM i user in 7.5 TR1 and 7.4 TR7. With dozens of new and enhanced database functions and SQL services, these TRs in fact may be the biggest releases ever, according to Scott Forstie, the Db2 for i architect at IBM.

  During a recent interview with IT Jungle about the new Watson geospatial capabilities that his team delivered in the database (which you can read about here), Forstie pondered the journey he and his team have been on, and how it’s culminated to this …

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• IBM Unveils Fall 2022 Tech Refreshes for IBM i

  October 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM yesterday announced Technology Refreshes for its two most current IBM i operating systems, including 7.5 and 7.4. Security continues to be a big driver of new functionality with 7.5 TR1 and 7.4 TR7. But the fall TRs bring a bevy of enhancements across all areas, including the database, IBM i services, open source, application development, and analytics, among others.

  Security has been the number one concern for CIOs for a few years now, and IBM has responded with a number of new features in IBM i. Some of the new security features exist in IBM i Navigator, the GUI …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing Case 4 – Investigating Time-Sensitive Transaction Issues

  June 6, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  Among the central processing hardware resources in a computer system – CPU, GPU, memory, disk, PCI-Express I/O bus – disk has always been the slowest component. Even the latest flash disk or NVM-Express flash drive or card is slowest, but not by much. Back in the days of hard disk, disk I/O was the most popular cause of performance problems. From experience, I always looked at it first in my investigation.

  The modern SAN flash disk can still be the performance bottleneck when it is not deployed properly, as I shared in Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 3 – …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Taking Charge of Your Hardware Refresh in 2022

  February 14, 2022 Peder Lundblad

  IBM i shops are well known for paying a premium for their systems because they are worth it, but they are also just as well known for hanging onto aging hardware a bit past its prime, which has its own kinds of economic costs in higher maintenance and operational costs as well as the risk of a failure in some key component of the hardware or of having an older operating system release that does not have a key security vulnerability or bug patched.

  IBM does a very good job of keeping hardware technology cycles regular, and so there is …

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• Surprise! It’s IBM i Technology Refresh Time

  September 13, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM surprised the midrange world last week by announcing Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4, which became generally available on Friday. The fall TRs, which typically are announced in October, brought support for the new Power10-based Power E1080 server in addition to a slew of enhancements to the operating system and surrounding IBM i products.

  The big piece of news with the new TRs – IBM i TR 7.3 TR11 and 7.4 TR5 – is support for servers based on IBM’s speedy new Power10 processor, which is the first Power chip based on its 7 nanometer …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 24

  June 14, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  Don’t get hyper this week, but the big thing happening in IBM i Land is a set of high impact and pervasive, or HIPER, PTF patches to all four current variants of the IBM i operating system. There are also tweaks to storage PTFs and for the MQSeries message queueing middleware that runs on various platforms from Big Blue, including IBM i.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level:

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Temporary Storage PTFs
  • MQ for IBM i – v9.0.0/v9.1.0/V9.2.0

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Temporary Storage PTFs
  • MQ for

  …

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• IBM Unveils New and Improved IBM i Services

  April 14, 2021 Alex Woodie

  If you like IBM i Services — those SQL-based methods for executing a range of tasks in the operating system — then you’re in luck, because IBM has included a handful of new and improved IBM i Services in the Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i 7.4 and 7.3, which were unveiled yesterday and ship this Friday.

  IBM has developed an affinity for IBM i Services in the last few releases of the operating system. And why not? Users seem to like having a SQL-based alternative to CL commands and APIs. And since the IBM i Services are so easily …

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