Announcing IBM i Migrate While Active, and Other Offerings From IBM i Technology Refresh
Brandon Pederson, IBM i and Power product marketing manager, highlights IBM’s newest offerings
It is once again the busy fall season within the IBM i community, which means the next Technology Refresh for the platform, IBM i 7.4 TR11 and IBM i 7.5 TR5. These were announced Oct. 8 and will become mostly available Nov. 22, with the remaining updates available by the end of the year.
You can read everything included in this Technology Refresh on the update pages the team does an amazing job of maintaining: IBM i 7.4 TR11 and IBM i 7.5 TR5.
Today we are adding to the momentum of the Oct. 8 announcement with a new offering for IBM i, IBM i Migrate While Active. I’ll provide a high-level summary of this new offering and the latest enhancements included in this Technology Refresh.
IBM i Migrate While Active
Many of our IBM i clients are starting to or already have adopted IBM Power Virtual Server for use cases such as dev/test, backup, DR and production workloads. Other clients have been requesting the ability to migrate IBM i workloads to Power Virtual Server while keeping business-critical applications supporting operations online and available.
The IBM i team has delivered on this feedback, and today we are announcing IBM i Migrate While Active. IBM i Migrate While Active provides capabilities to accelerate migration of IBM i workloads to Power Virtual Server while maintaining uptime. It guides the user through a choice of different patterns to migrate a base system save of the partition and provides a data synchronization stage to track and synchronize data changes that occur while the IBM i partition is being restored on the IBM Cloud.
IBM PowerHA SystemMirror for i
In addition to IBM i Migrate While Active, enhancements and improvements have been made to our HA portfolio for IBM i. IBM PowerHA SystemMirror for i has expanded integration with Power Virtual Server. Building upon existing Geographic Mirroring support for hybrid cloud environments, this release introduces support for IASP-based replication and switching technologies within Power Virtual Server, including Global Replication Services for IASPs, LUN-level switching, and IASP-based FlashCopy. Global Replication Services support asynchronous replication between two data centers in Power Virtual Server, providing a similar management experience to Global Mirror technologies used in on-prem environments. Learn more about the latest with PowerHA here.
Db2 for i
It wouldn’t be a Technology Refresh without an update to Db2 for i, and this time is no different. This Technology Refresh delivers several updates to the database for modern application development on IBM i, including enhancements to three functions that improve performance of code, increase efficiency for the database engineer and simplify the creation of Universally Unique Identifiers (UUID).
With Db2 for i Services, the MTI_INFO table function has been enhanced to include member name information when returning details about Maintained Temporary Indexes built on SQL-partitioned tables. If you don’t already, make sure to have this page bookmarked for the latest updates on Db2 for i.
Code for IBM i
Code for IBM i, the extension for maintaining RPG, CL and COBOL right from Visual Studio Code, is growing with over 39,000 installs and 47 active contributors from the community. The open-source project continues to support modern IBM i development practices and delivers several enhancements with this Technology Refresh.
Within the Db2 for i extension, expanded capabilities include notebook support, multiple result sets and SQL Error Logging Facility (SELF) view integration. Also now available are debug service management, expanded language support, enhanced tooltips, improved DBCS handling and local workspace compilation for display, physical and logical files. Learn more about these and other enhancements made to Code for IBM i by the community on the GitHub page.
System Administration
With the transition to subscription-term licensing for IBM i, we’ve made updates in IBM Navigator for i to make it easier for system administrators to see the status of licenses within their environment. The dashboard and system home page now provide clear notifications for upcoming operating system subscription expirations. IBM i subscriptions and system product licenses can now be monitored against customizable thresholds, and these thresholds can be configured under “Connection Properties”.
IBM i Access Client Solutions also delivers enhanced capabilities in this Technology Refresh, including expanded management of custom user examples and new additional IBM-provided Insert from Examples. See the latest for Navigator for i here and IBM i Access Client Solutions here.
Much of the team is at IBM TechXchange in Las Vegas Oct. 21-24, so if you’re here too, come stop by Booth 740 to see the latest hardware to run IBM i, the IBM Power S1012. COMMON also has a track of IBM i-specific sessions, so make sure to add those to your agenda here.
Speaking of COMMON, if you haven’t already registered for NAViGATE in Toronto Nov. 4-6, do that here now and check out the session guide. Finally, make sure to get registered for all the upcoming IBM i Guided Tours on Oct. 30, Nov. 6 and Nov. 13.