IBM i Systems - Facts and New Features

The history of IBM i starts with the launch of the very famous AS400 systems in 1980. It is exceptional and quite interesting to know that IBM i operating system is still very popular and extensively used in many organizations across the globe. Unlike any other legacy technology that lost its importance over time due to failure in some or the other aspect, IBM i has evolved with time and comes integrated with all the latest updates.

So, those who are already familiar with this OS know how secure and reliable it has been making it the backbone for industries like finance, manufacturing, logistics, insurance etc.

What’s extravagant about IBM i?

Here are a few facts/updates about IBM i which are enough to understand that it is one of the robust operating systems.

1) Google joined hands with IBM i

To enable organizations work on cloud-based systems, Google rolled out a very important update recently. Now you can run your IBM power systems on Google cloud no matter it has Linux, IBM i or AIX as OS. This partnership emerged while looking at the increasing importance of IBM power systems and their ability to handle mission-critical workloads. There are many benefits offered by the IBM Power systems on Google Cloud. As enterprise workloads cannot be handled by any local system, IBM power systems are specially designed for handling such a workload while using efficient technical support of the Google cloud.

Till now only IBM has been the leading provider of cloud-based power systems and now Google is the next one. The beauty of the Power systems is that they are helping big tech organizations to handle huge workloads based on SAP and Oracle databases. They move these workloads on the cloud without any extra engineering or applications. Now these power systems are integrated with Google’s services. Google is working on bringing more enterprise workloads to its platforms and the platforms are also willing to move on it.

IBM working with Google cloud seems a bit weird because IBM has its own cloud offering but in order to sell more and more power servers, partnering with Google is profitable.

2) The release of IBM i 7.4 and DB2 Mirror

The year 2019 saw the release of IBM i 7.4 with more updated features to handle massive workloads. This new version has been rolled out with many new features like security, application development, and accessing IBM i. The security feature in 7.4 version is ‘by object’ which means the object's ability allows the clients to know how a particular object is being used by all the users. The object feature even helps the client to find out the authority of the users as they access the object. This ultimately leads to locking the objects which the client wants to lock and uninterrupted security.

IBM i 7.4 has a lot to offer beyond security too. The application development and updates in RPG and COBOL require the implementation of 7.4 version.

IBM DB2 Mirror is the solution to get rid of any type of server downtime. Industries like banking and finance cannot afford server discrepancies hence the release of DB2 Mirror is a sigh of relief for them. With this product, clients can connect the two power systems and then the two systems present their DB2 databases as if they are one database spread across the two systems. This showcases that if the client wants to use DB2 on both the systems they can easily do it. DB2 mirror allows the database functions like insert, delete and update to be applied simultaneously on both the systems. The two systems sharing the same database can use the same applications at the same time.

3) Power9 processors

After Power8 processors supporting up to 16 terabytes of memory, IBM Power system E980 with Power9 processors can support up to 64 TB memory and deliver extraordinary performance and availability for data centers. The other IBM Power server which supports Power9 is IBM E950.

IBM Power systems integrated with Power9 processors are considered much reliable, scalable, prompt and infrastructure resilient. They offer commendable speed up to 1.5x the performance of Power8 processors.

Talking about the architecture, Power9 processors are built to handle massive workloads and have improved core and chip design. It provides superb, bandwidth and capacity to analyze data.

The Future

With a huge necessity of security and stability, IBM i systems are the most trending, especially in countries like the US. The IBM i system has recorded only 1.5% of annual attrition and around 72% are already using it to run their core, mission-critical businesses. Also, business owners using IBM i systems believe that they get a better return on investment through these systems. As these power systems still capture the maximum market and are winning trust every day, the future seems bright and productive.

Besides these updates and current features of the IBM power systems, there are many which will be rolled out soon. For more information on IBM i systems or hiring programmers to code for applications running on your IBM i systems, contact us today.