IBM i 7.5 – Paving the Way for Innovation | Skytap | Your Traditional Applications, Now in the Cloud

Overview

In today’s rapidly evolving computing environment, IBM i still continues to be a strategic asset for enterprises and one of the most secure server platforms ever seen. Dating back to 1988, AS/400, or its modern version, i Series, has followed a secure data-centric open-source model, catering to newer workloads like social and mobile applications, big data and analytics. IBM i 7.4 was announced in 2019 and the modernization continues with IBM i 7.5 being announced on May 3, 2022. This blog overviews the latest features and enhancements incorporated in IBM i 7.5   

Hardware Requirements: 

IBM i 7.5 is supported on select POWER9 and POWER10 servers. Customers using previous POWER platforms need to upgrade to Power9 or Power10 to leverage the advantages of IBM i 7.5. Power and IBM i model to OS-level mapping can be found here

Technical Enhancements: 

Businesses today are undergoing significant transformations. The good news is that IBM has always given a ray of hope to overcome these challenges with continuous innovation and augmentations. Below are the highlights of technical enhancements in the latest version of IBM i 7.5. 

Security  

Security has always been a built-in feature of IBM i from its very inception. With the below enhancements in 7.5, security has been further secured in IBM i. 

Save and Restore 

RSTUSRPRF USRPRF(*ALL) no longer requires a dedicated system. Specifying *ALL for the User profile (USRPRF) parameter on the Restore User Profiles (RSUSRPRF) command no longer requires that all other subsystems on the system be ended.  

The new default value for the ASYNCBRING parameter on the Save Object (SAV) command and the QsrSave API provides better performance for saving IFS data. Objects are brought into memory asynchronously during IFS save processing, improving the performance of the save operation. The GO SAVE menu options automatically inherit this new default.  

The progress message displayed during an IFS restore now includes the size of objects that have completed. 

Db2 for i 

Open source for IBM i

IBM i continues to enable several open-source Java application servers on IBM i. Some examples include WildFly, Eclipse Jetty, and Apache Tomcat. 

Support is offered as part of IBM’s open-source support offering. 

Learn more about how IBM i 7.5 paves the way for innovation by reading this great article by Alex Woodie over at IT Jungle: https://www.itjungle.com/2022/05/11/ibm-delivers-more-out-of-the-box-security-with-ibm-i-7-5