A Word from iTech Solutions President, Pete Massiello.

Last Tuesday morning I wrote in a tweet “It’s a good day to be an IBM i customer”.
Someone replied, “Isn’t every day a great day to be an IBM i customer?” I can’t argue with that. But last Tuesday was IBM announcement day, and who doesn’t love announcements? Especially new releases of IBM i.
Three years is certainly a long time coming, but I think the wait was well worth it, especially when you hear what IBM i 7.4 contained.
Internally, we have been calling this iNext for the longest time, and it is great to be able to call it by its real name and not have to remember to use “iNext” as we couldn’t say 7.4 until announcement day. This release is packed with lots of cool new features and functions, the biggest is certainly Db2 Mirror for i, a synchronous replication for continuous availability for customers who can’t afford any downtime at all.
Basically, we have two IBM i partitions (preferably on different Power machines in the same computer room), connect these two systems with very high-speed Ethernet connection called RoCE, and then the two systems appear as one database spread across the two systems. This is an active-active configuration, where the database operations happen synchronously across the two systems. Updates can follow in either direction, and this appears as one database being hosted on two different machines.
I won’t go into all the details here about the new release, as I wrote a blog with many of the details you will need to know, and we provided a video which you can watch to get a good overview of many of the new features and enhancements. As I play with 7.4, I am finding new things every day. There are two additional releases currently being planned after 7.4, and I know from my trips to Rochester they are actively working on iNext already. You can now see the expected release dates, and the support roadmap below.
Support for IBM i is going out past 2031!!!! Tell me one other operating system with a roadmap that long?[CONTINUE READING]

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