Guest post by Dan Sundt, Senior IT Specialist, IBM

Your company is one of tens of thousands running IBM i. It’s possible that you’ve been running it for over two decades, from AS/400 to iSeries, System i, and now Power Systems. If so, you’re not unlike many executives around the globe in a variety of industries—you’re comfortable with the strength of the platform, you’re looking forward to continued low operating costs, and you enjoy the high ROI a proven platform delivers. But don’t get too comfortable and secure. Information technology evolves at a blistering pace, and there are now more ways for IBM i to provide competitive advantage, minimize IT risks, and improve profitability.

IBM has been putting intellectual muscle into IBM i, making it a strong business solution for today, tomorrow, and years to come. Last fall, IBM released enhancements to IBM i version 6.1, and recently introduced IBM i 7.1. This latest operating system release/upgrade ensures that your company is running a leading-edge business operating system with up-to-date business capabilities. Within the familiar structure of IBM i, your company can reap the benefits of enhanced functions including:

• DB2^® for i support for XML: DB2, the integrated database for IBM i, now natively supports XML. XML data can now be stored in its native format, split into relational database columns, or created from existing database objects. Support for OmniFind Text Search in DB2 adds simpler access to non-structured data that is often stored in XML format. DB2 for i support for XML helps companies exchange information between customers, suppliers, and partners, improving communications with external applications and organizations.
• PowerHA™ SystemMirror for i: Asynchronous geographic mirroring with PowerHA extends the distance supported for multisite DR solutions, and supports both internal disk and SAN-based solutions. New PowerHA LUN level switching provides a data center a high-availability solution, where a set of disks on IBM DS8000 or IBM DS6000 are automatically switched between servers for scheduled maintenance or in the event of a failure. PowerHA allows a company to extend the distance between locations for disaster recovery implementation, thus providing a robust, easy-to-manage, high-availability disaster recovery solution.
• Virtualization enhancements: Virtualization support with PowerVM is extended to enable IBM i 6.1 to host IBM i 7.1 partitions and storage—functionality that allows for simpler testing of a new release before a software upgrade. IBM i 7.1 also can host an IBM i 6.1 partition, enabling companies to keep an application that requires an earlier release after upgrading their main application environment. This support is available with POWER6® and POWER7™ servers, and IBM i also supports AIX® and Linux® client partitions. With the increased flexibility available via virtualization enhancements, companies can reduce IT infrastructure costs and, because they are no longer locked into their existing system or applications, are afforded the freedom to upgrade while knowing key applications can migrate with them.
• Systems management enhancements for IBM Systems Director Navigator for i: Allows companies to set a target server that can run IBM i 5.4, 6.1, or 7.1, thus enabling the management server to run in one place with a single browser, and to be used in managing multiple operating system environments. Navigator’s performance management and investigator capabilities are enhanced with additional storage and tape metrics, plus disk response time and Java memory perspectives. IBM Systems Director management server is also enhanced to monitor and manage target IBM i environments, including management of program temporary fixes (PTFs). Systems Director provides an integrated platform management solution for IBM i and heterogeneous servers that, along with system management enhancements, delivers evermore simplified systems management and, thus, reduced operational costs.
• Security enhancements: Allows an administrator to turn on and off ASP encryption (which became available with IBM i 6.1), as well as permitting the data encryption key to be changed for existing users. A new database feature called “field procedures” (user-written exit programs executed every time a column is changed or new values are inserted) enables column-level encryption in a database table for sensitive fields of data without requiring any application changes. The IBM i 7.1 security enhancements both improve system performance (application changes take a significant amount of time as all the data in the disk pool needs to be processed) and, more importantly, allows companies to establish the appropriate level of security for specific sensitive data.
• Others: Rational^® software development product enhancements (such as IBM Rational Open Access: RPG Edition, which simplifies the development of transaction processing applications for mobile devices and web services), Zend PHP enhancements, web-application serving enhancements, and more. A long list of IBM i 7.1 features allows clients to reduce cost, improve service, and manage risk of their IT infrastructures.

If your company sat on the sidelines while other firms took advantage of IBM i 6.1 upgrades, you’ll be pleased to learn that it’s possible to leap directly to 7.1 from IBM i 5.4.

What’s the bottom line? You can now reduce costs, improve service, and better manage the risks of your IT infrastructure with these just-released IBM i 7.1 enhancements. Better yet, more enhancements are on the way. Perhaps most importantly, IBM i 7.1 is supported on a wide range of new and existing hardware: Power Systems servers and blades with POWER7 processors, Power Systems servers and blades with POWER6/6+ processors, and System i servers with POWER5/5+ processors.

Your choice of IBM i has kept your company competitive and growing for a long time. Why not leverage the latest business advantages found in IBM i 7.1?

Spending on information technologies (IT) is heating up in most industries. For example, Gartner, Inc. recently raised its growth prospects for worldwide IT spending to $3.4 trillion in 2010, a 5.3% increase over 2009; Gartner projects $3.5 trillion in spending for 2011, a 4.2% increase from 2010 [www.gartner.com]. Manufacturers are once again investing to improve infrastructures and grow their businesses. Yet after the last two years, manufacturers also realize that every IT  dollar counts—and needs to pay off sooner rather than later.   

A recent study of System i users conducted by The MPI Group (and sponsored by Infor) showed that all the participating System i manufacturers believe that return on investment is an important purchasing criteria: 75% said “extremely important” and 25% said “somewhat important.” Not surprisingly, 71% of these manufacturers measure ROI. Savvy executives have long known that in making IT purchases, it’s especially important that they project total cost of ownership (TCO) over the life of the investment.

Yet many manufacturers lose that TCO focus after a few months or years. Long-term considerations sometimes fade as systems become familiar (i.e., same old, same old) and newer IT options entice buyers. Those firms need to reassess their System i capabilities and potential, evaluating ongoing TCO. What will they likely find? That their cost of ownership is steadily decreasing, especially if their systems (as is typical) have been functioning well and they’ve effectively managed their IT assets.

Tens of thousands of manufacturers still prosper on the System i platform, leveraging previous investments over an expanding lifetime. They’re putting freed-up IT dollars into new System i solutions to stay current with IT trends—without the expense or pain of a platform change. For example, they’re upgrading System i-based ERP systems via Infor’s Flex Upgrade and Flex Exchange programs. Others are extending ERP functionality with new System i applications from Infor, such as performance management (PM), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply-chain management (SCM).

Posted by Kari Miller, Senior Director, Product Management, System i