THE FOUR HUNDRED - Power Systems & IBM i Insights

1. What You Will Find In IBM i 7.6 TR1 and IBM i 7.5 TR7

   It’s early October, which means leaves are changing colors, nights are getting colder, and IBM developers in southern Minnesota and elsewhere are gearing up the autumnal Technology Refreshes for the IBM i operating system.

   With last week’s announcements of TR1 for IBM i 7.6 and TR7 for IBM i 7.5, which ship November 21, IBM has committed to delivering a slew of updates and new functionality across the range of IBM i system software, from application development to administration.

   Before we get into the specific areas of IBM i, let’s cover the general enhancements it made with I/O handling. For …

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2. Three Things For IBM i Shops To Consider About DevSecOps

   Way back in the Great Recession, when money was getting tight and the technical debt was getting high, the concept of agile infrastructure evolved into DevOps, the synchronization and coordination of application development, which likes to move fast, with IT operations, which likes to have things running in a stable fashion. The idea runs counter to half of the philosophy of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has espoused the principle to “move fast and break things.”

   DevOps wants to move fast, but it most assuredly does not want to break things, and many millions of programmers and operations staff …

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3. Big Blue Converges IBM i RPG And System Z COBOL Code Assistants Into “Project Bob”

   We have been anticipating the rollout of the Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG on the IBM i platform ever since IBM previewed a code assistant for the System z mainframe platform in August 2023 to help COBOL shops port their applications to Java on the mainframe. And lo and behold, the Rochester team followed suit, but with a slightly different approach, creating a Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG, which was also created using IBM’s homegrown “Granite” large language models.

   Well, apparently, forget all of that. At the TechExchange 2025 developer conference last week, IBM was showing off a new, unified …

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4. As I See It: Retirement Challenges

   If you work long enough, eventually you’ll earn the right not to work. Well, maybe. Retirement has become an increasingly tricky proposition. The three-legged stool designed to support the financial weight of life beyond employment is collapsing. For millions of workers approaching retirement, the support once provided by pensions, personal savings, and social security is no longer reliable. Once thought to be constructed of sturdy oak, the stool now resembles something patched together with balsa wood and duct tape.

   For most workers, pensions are either a distant memory or an abstraction. According to figures compiled by everyone’s “favorite” research assistant, …

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5. IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 41

   I don’t know about you, but we figured there were Technology Refreshes coming, especially with IBM’s TechExchange 2025 developer conference going on last week. However, unlike in past years, we didn’t get any advanced warning. So check out the initial coverage of the new TRs for IBM i 7.5 and IBM i 7.6 and keep an eye out for the coming weeks of detailed drill-downs.

   There is also a pretty serious set of vulnerabilities in the IBM i platform that you need to deal with. Check out Security Bulletin: IBM i is affected by Remote Code Execution, Deserialization of Untrusted …

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