• Spring 2024 IBM i Technology Refresh Unveiled by IBM

  May 8, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM today took the wraps off the latest Technology Refresh for the IBM i platform. When IBM i 7.5 TR4 and 7.4 TR10 ship on June 14, customers will find enhancements such as Merlin version 2, new features in Navigator and ACS, security improvements, a couple of RPG enhancements, HA and DR enhancements, and a host of new SQL-based database services, among other capabilities.

  In addition to new features, which we’ll get to in a second, the launch of IBM i 7.5 TR4 and 7.4 TR10 is important for an unexpected reason: It will mark the beginning of IBM’s transition …

  Read more

• IBM Hardware, Software, And Support Prices Hiked

  April 8, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last fall/summer we caught wind of the fact that IBM was going to raise prices on hardware and software effective this year, and then we never saw the announcement letter from Big Blue on General Price Harmonization or the one on price increases relating specifically to Power Systems and IBM i.

  As it turns out, those announcements were made on September 1 last year and they went into effect on January 1 – something that was not apparent to us (or the business partners that we talk to from time to time) until we were reviewing the subscription pricing deal …

  Read more

• Thoroughly Modern: A Practical Primer For The IBM i Cloud Journey

  March 11, 2024 Lief Morin

  Cloud has evolved significantly from its roots in the shared services era of IBM mainframes in the 1960s and 1970s. While some parallels can be drawn, today’s cloud landscape emphasizes flexible capacity and pricing models over traditional outright purchases of computing resources like the IBM i platform. The prevailing trend towards major cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud has underscored the importance of a shared architecture approach for cost-effectiveness and business prosperity.

  Most businesses rely on heavily modified solutions for their core business applications, so they find significant benefits in a shared …

  Read more

• What’s New with Db2 Mirror, PowerHA, and BRMS

  November 8, 2023 Alex Woodie

  There’s something for everyone in the new releases of IBM i that IBM will be shipping later this month. For administrators who revel in having well-run high availability, continuous availability, and tape backups, the new releases will not disappoint.

  The most substantial enhancements appear to have been saved for Db2 Mirror for i, which is IBM’s continuous availability solution for IBM i. The new management and monitoring features should bring some major improvements to how customers interact with the product.

  Some of the biggest changes are due to the addition of the new “Health Center” component to the Db2 Mirror …

  Read more

• Skytap and Precisely in Azure HA Hookup

  November 1, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Skytap customers running on IBM i servers in Microsoft Azure data centers can now utilize MIMIX high availability software from Precisely (formerly Vision Solutions) as a result of a partnership the two vendors unveiled this month. Customers also get access to consumption-based pricing in the Azure Marketplace as a result of the new deal.

  While Azure and all public clouds are predominantly composed of standard Intel servers, Skytap has developed a specialty of integrating non-standard computing environments, like IBM i, with public cloud infrastructure.

  The Seattle, Washington-based company has an agreement with Microsoft to manage IBM Power servers running IBM …

  Read more

• What the Latest ALL400s Survey Tells Us About the IBM i Community

  October 18, 2023 Alex Woodie

  What is the most popular development tool in the IBM i community? What technology exists in nearly every shop? What BI tools are in use? And what activities are sitting in the IT backlog’s of IBM i shops? These are some of the questions that ALL400s answered with the latest edition of its IBM i community survey.

  You may have heard about ALL400s as the comprehensive list of IBM i customers around the world. John Rockwell, the Florida man behind ALL400s, does his best to keep the list as updated as possible.

  In addition to the list, Rockwell has put …

  Read more

• Fall 2023 IBM i Tech Refresh Brings Something For Everyone

  October 11, 2023 Alex Woodie

  As expected, IBM yesterday unveiled its fall Technology Refresh (TR) for IBM i, with updates starting to become available on November 17. IBM announced no new products as part of the fall 2023 TR cycle, but it did spread the love around by giving just about everybody something to cheer about in IBM i 7.5 TR3 and 7.4 TR9.

  Lots of different products that make up the IBM i environment will see some pretty meaningful enhancements with this release. If you spend a lot of time in Navigator for i or ACS, you will see new stuff. We haven’t had …

  Read more

• Shield Builds on Success with Nagios for IBM i

  September 27, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Traditional system monitoring tools on IBM i are valuable, but they have one big downside: They often require an operator to sit there and stare at the screen to detect when things go wrong. “That gets old very quickly,” says Chris Hird, the Shield Advanced Solutions director who found an alternative approach in Nagios.

  Nagios is unique among monitoring tools – at least in the IBM i world – in that it actively runs checks for a variety of systems on monitored machines on a continuous basis. It is constantly pinging target server (and network and storage devices) to check …

  Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 26

  June 26, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  In this week’s edition of the IBM i PTF Guide, I have added a Ref tab, which contains general, pertinent information not found elsewhere in the Guide. I also wanted to point out that with a PTF for Advanced Job Scheduler server side, which is SI83469 and which is included in HTTP group PTF update June 2023, AJS will support processing of Set ASP Group when enabled. Finally, IASP support built in!

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last published:

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • Backup Recovery Solutions
  • IBM HTTP Server for

  …

  Read more

• PowerHA Now Replicates To Multiple Targets Sans SAN

  May 8, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The new release of PowerHA will enable customers to use geographic mirroring to replicate their IBM i data to two or more targets. That one enhancement brings a host of benefits for customers not using SAN-based storage, including new deployment scenarios using on-prem, cloud, and hybrid topologies, as well as lower downtime for hardware upgrades, mirrored Db2 Mirror pairs, and lower RPO for tape backups.

  Prior to PowerHA SystemMirror, most IBM midrange customers who were using high availability (HA) software were using solutions based on logical replication, whereby changes to IBM i data are picked up from the local receiver …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles