Thursday, February 25, 2021

IBM i support roadmap update

ibm i support roadmap for march 2021

I was at a presentation by Allison Butterill, Offering Manager for IBM i, where she shared the latest IBM i and Power support roadmap.

I always like to share these to counter the nay-sayers claiming that the "AS400 is dead", AS400 has been dead for more than a decade but IBM i and POWER live on.

Looking at the chart, below, you will notice that the dark blue bars are followed on by a light blue bar. This signifies when a release goes off support, but support can be prolonged by purchasing extended support.


Click on image to open larger version

For release 7.1 there is SE1 which denotes extended for this support. The shaded area that follows is an additional extended support, SE2, that will be available starting in November this year.

The details for the extended support for 7.2 are still being determined.

You will notice that POWER 7 and 7+ hardware support was ended at the end of 2020.

It is also interesting to see the available upgrade path that allows you to upgrade from 7.1 to 7.3 and 7.2 to 7.4, without having to perform the upgrade to the release in between. Nice work IBM.

Allison also stressed that it is in your best interest to keep your IBM i partitions and Power servers at the latest release your hardware supports so you have all the latest fixes and security enhancements.

5 comments:

  1. Hello. FYI Your link on the right side of your page for "Knowledge Center for 7.3" returned this message on the IBM site: "Your search query did not match any documents in IBM i. Try modifying the search keywords."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have been unable to find a "home" page in the KnowledgeCenter for each release. In that absence I decided to link to the "search" page as that can be release specific.

      Delete
  2. Would this link work, https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_73/rzahg/welcome.htm ?

    I changed the 3 to 4 and it connects me to the 7.4 site.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for that URL. I managed to find the equivalent pages for 7.1 and 7.2.

      All of the links on the right have been changed.

      Delete
  3. V5R4 is the most familiar with me.

    ReplyDelete

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