• Surprise! It’s 2024 Fall TR Time for IBM i

  October 9, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM announced the Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i version 7.5 and 7.4 yesterday, bringing a host of new capabilities to the proprietary operating system. As expected, the surprise update covers a range of IBM i facilities, including Db2, Navigator, ACS, PowerHA, and the development tools.

  Navigator gets several more enhancements with the new TRs, including: a new dashboard with software licensing information; Web-based administration of network facilities; support for monitoring of Java 11 and Java 17 jobs; enhancements to the Performance Data Investigator (PDI); and new options for working with audit journals, among other capabilities.

  IBM also includes the …

  Read more

• Big Blue Makes The Case For IBM i P05 And P10 Subscriptions

  September 16, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been chronicling the transformation of the IBM i software stack from perpetual licenses with tech support to the more modern and now more normal subscription pricing that we have for both commercial and consumer software and other services these days.

  The last program in the stack to move from perpetual to subscription for the IBM i P05 and P10 software tiers was Backup, Recovery and Media Services for i (5770-BR1), which was sunsetted on August 27 in announcement letter AD24-0665, and on January 1, 2025, you will not be able to order a perpetual license to BRMS …

  Read more

• IBM Clarifies Where It’s Going with IBM i Subscriptions, Product Realignment

  September 11, 2024 Alex Woodie

  As an avid IT Jungle reader, you’re probably aware that IBM is moving its IBM i software stack from a traditional licensing scheme to one based on subscriptions. The company is in the middle of the move at the moment, and it’s also in the middle of a product realignment, which has been the source of some confusion. IBM hosted a webinar recently that helped to clarify where it’s at now with the shift to subscriptions and the product realignment, and where it’s going in the future.

  IBM first announced back in May 2022 that it was shifting to subscription-based …

  Read more

• IBM Begins the Purge of Old Greenscreen Utilities

  July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM is prepping the IBM i community to prepare to adapt to some substantial changes that are coming with the next release of IBM i, including the end of support for a large swath of the Application Development ToolSet (ADTS) that ships with Rational Development Studio (RDS). Source Entry Utility (SEU) and Programming Development Manager (PDM) are not among the ADTS tools getting the boot, but that’s not stopping midrange professionals from speculating that their time in IBM i is limited, too.

  As part of its May 7 Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5, IBM issued a “software …

  Read more

• April Showers Bring May IBM i Security Vulnerabilities

  May 8, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM has patched more than a dozen security flaws in IBM i and related products this spring, including serious flaws in the operating system proper and the compilers, and a critical vulnerability in Administrative Runtime Expert that landed a nearly perfect CVSS Base score.

  In the interest of time, let’s cover the security vulnerabilities in descending order of severity. That means we’re starting with the worst and then moving on to the slightly less worse.

  ARE Flaw

  The flaw reported in the Administration Runtime Expert for i (ARE), which IBM launched in 2010 to make it easier to manage IBM …

  Read more

• AWS Taps Precisely to Bring IBM i Data Into Its Cloud

  December 6, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Amazon Web Services and Precisely have entered into a partnership agreement that will see AWS reselling Precisely’s data replication software to bring IBM i data into the cloud. It’s part of a larger effort by AWS to bring more IBM workloads into its data centers.

  Precisely and AWS previously had a relationship to move mainframe data into the world’s largest public cloud through a program called AWS Mainframe Modernization Data Replication. In late November, the companies announced they’re expanding the program to include IBM i. (While not technically a mainframe, the IBM i server is often called a mainframe. If …

  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

• IBM Looking To Open Up Debugging On IBM i

  June 8, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Things are moving quickly now in the IBM i development world, particularly when it comes to lightweight, Web-based IDEs, such as IBM’s new Merlin. However, the need to debug programs and the lack of a debugger for these IDEs is causing a bit of a roadblock to developer productivity with these newer IDEs. That’s why IBM is seeking a way to get IBM i debugging capabilities into more people’s hands.

  The official IBM i Debugger product is bundled as a JAR file with IBM Toolbox for Java, and is directly integrated with Rational Developer for i (RDi), IBM’s flagship …

  Read more

• 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 …

  Read more

• What’s New with RDi Version 9.6.0.7

  March 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM last month unveiled Rational Developer for i (RDi) version 9.6.0.7, the first release of the popular IBM i development environment in about a year. With this release, IBM is giving developers a handful of new capabilities, including the ability to create procedures out of pieces of code, as well as the ability to test incoming parameters.

  RDi is IBM’s flagship integrated development environment (IDE) for the IBM i platform. The product isn’t universally used across the IBM i community, and it’s not free. But many IBM i professionals swear by the graphical and modern IDE, particularly compared to older …

  Read more

Previous Articles