THE FOUR HUNDRED - Power Systems & IBM i Insights

1. IBM Gets Bob 1.0 Off The Ground

   IBM this month finally will get a coding co-pilot into the hands of its IBM i installed base with the launch of Bob. The general availability of Bob 1.0.0 on March 24 will mark the end of the long wait for IBM i customers – and in particular, the large population of RPG developers – to start using IBM-branded AI software to maintain and develop IBM i software.

   The world of generative AI moves quickly, as the large language models (LLMs) from frontier providers improve on a weekly, if not daily, basis. This is both exciting, as the capabilities of …

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2. You Store The Crown Jewels In A Safe, Not In A Bucket

   All petabytes are not equal. A petabyte of unstructured data that may have a few nuggets of informational gold veins running through it, for instance, is definitely a lot more valuable than a petabyte of cat videos. But it is not anywhere nearly as valuable as the database and application code backups of thousands of customers running IBM i systems.

   And that, in a nutshell, is why Fresche Solutions, which is perhaps best known as a provider of application and database modernization tools in the IBM i market, but which is also a cloud in its own right as well …

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3. More Power Systems Withdrawals, And Some From Red Hat, Too

   It is a quiet time in IBM i Land right now as we await the P05-class Power Systems 1112 “Mini” system announcement, which we are guessing will happen sometime between March and the POWERUp 2026 conference, which will be hosted in New Orleans between April 27 and 30. There are some sundry things that you should be aware of, just the same.

   In announcement letter AD26-0071, dated February 24, IBM is tearing a whole bunch of features and cables from the Power Systems lineup, effective immediately. A cursor look shows that a lot of these are pretty old features …

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4. Price Increases Are Here, Or Pending, And For Sure For Memory

   The rumor mill was buzzing last week about price increases at IBM and in its Power Systems business in particular. We have no idea what is real or not, but we thought it was our responsibility to let you know what is going on in the infrastructure market and why prices increases are inevitable – if they have not already taken place.

   What we can tell you is that we watch IBM’s announcements like a hawk and we have not seen any price increases thus far this year. But given the state of the flash and main memory markets, we …

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5. IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 9

   Welcome to March. You have five security vulnerabilities to take care of. The good news is that there is not a lot of other PTF stuff you have to worry about if you are on IBM i 7.3 through IBM i 7.6. There are Group HIPER and Group Security updates for IBM i 7.2, which is still under extended support.

   Let’s go through the security vulnerabilities to start, as we usually do.

   First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM Rational Developer for i is affected by a memory exhaustion loop (CVE-2024-4068), which you can read about here. (And for …

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