Powering System i

Guest post by Dan Sundt, Senior IT Specialist, IBM

As readers of this blog know, Infor is building a dynamic array of IBM i solution improvements to allow users to expand IBM i functionality quickly and cost-effectively. I’m excited by the creativity and innovation that IBM partners, such as Infor, are using to reinvigorate the IBM i platform and by the enthusiastic reception these enhancements receive from the IBM i community.

Infor and others are doing the simplest—yet hardest—thing a company can do: listening to customers, in this case the users who rely on IBM i as the backbone of their businesses. A recent report from ITG¹ illustrates the ongoing value of IBM i combined with IBM Power Systems: costs that average 41% less than x86 servers and Microsoft Windows, and 47% less than x86 servers and Linux. IBM i deployments also offer lower software, support, and personnel costs.

IBM i still has more customers than any other IBM platform—hundreds of thousands of satisfied users in more than 115 countries and 20 industries. We’ve seen and heard the support for IBM i, and we’re doing more than just listening: we’re making substantial investments in the future of IBM i as a strategic element in IBM’s product portfolio.

How? IBM i, version 6.1, which came out in 2008, had something for everyone, such as enhancements to Java performance, storage area network (SAN) performance, support for a disk clustering, support for IBM BladeCenter, new encryption options, and IBM management through Systems Director. In 2010, IBM will be delivering a new release of IBM i that enables our clients to reduce costs, reduce energy consumption, improve IT staff productivity, and support business growth. For example:

• The integrated DB2 for i database will be enhanced with support for XML, enabling clients to store and search XML documents. IBM also plans that DB2 for i will support transparent encryption of a specific column in a database table enabling clients to better protect sensitive information.
  
  
• IBM PowerHA for i, which is a disk-clustering-based disaster recovery solution, will support asynchronous replication.
  
  
• Integrated storage management will further leverage solid-state disk (SSD) technology by automatically moving data that is accessed most frequently by SSDs, helping to improve application performance.
  
  
• New management tasks will be available in the web-based Systems Director Navigator for i, which provides a system administrator access to over 300 management tasks from a browser.
  
  
• Integration with IBM BladeCenter and IBM System x via iSCSI (internet small computer system interface) technology is being enhanced with support for software target support, allowing for a faster connection between IBM i and x86-based systems while potentially lowering the cost of the solution. With this support, IBM i provides storage resources for attached VMware, Windows, and Linux servers.
  
  
• Enhanced support for PDF documents enables the transformation of existing spool files to PDF files.

These are just a sampling of IBM’s plans for IBM i—and we’re just getting started. How can we help you get even more out of IBM Power Systems running IBM i?

Share your thoughts.

¹ ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/sa/wh/n/pol03062usen/POL03062USEN.PDF