Last week, IBM had a major announcement, which included several significant IBM i enhancements. There were so many great things announced for i that this blog will just review the latest updates at a high level and future blogs will discuss some of these enhancements in more detail. This is a departure from my usual approach to technical topics – but there was just so much content in this announcement that I wanted to make sure it gets the awareness it deserves. There was no way I could pick just one topic to write about this week.
It’s great to see so much function coming to i outside of a major release update. The challenge, of course, is how to document the new content. While the IBM i 7.1 Information Center gets updated on an ongoing basis, the IBM i developerWorks site is where you will find information on the latest updates and enhancements.
Once you get to the i developerWorks site, the “Technology udpates” link, found in the left-hand navigation pane, is where you can find more information regarding the ongoing enhancements being made to i. I wrote about this in the recent blog “iZone Shows You the Enhancements.”
Once you get to the Technology Updates page, you will discover additional navigation options. Information regarding the latest DB2 updates, i operating system updates, hardware and firmware updates and more can be found from here.
There were a couple little gems within the 7.1 announcement last week, including native zip and unzip capability and improved scaling in locking support within the operating system. Other areas that were enhanced include:
- Application Runtime Expert
- Integrated Web service client
- DB2 Web Query
- Zend PHP
- IBM Toolbox for Java / JTOpen
- Rational tools
- A new Business Intelligence solution offering
The content of IBM i Technology Refresh 3 (TR3) is pretty amazing; not only is there support for the latest POWER7 systems and I/O features that were announced, but you will also discover support for Ethernet Link Aggregation and Ethernet Layer 2 Bridging. In addition, the Virtual Partition Manager can now be used to create IBM i client partitions.
For the complete summary of these i enhancements, refer to the 7.1 Release for Announcement.
Finally, in case you haven’t seen it, IBM has released a new video (filmed at the Spring COMMON Conference) where our i clients describe the value of i to their businesses. The video can be found here or on YouTube.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.