IBM Announcement Roundup: A Little Bit Of Everything

January 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Welcome to 2025, everybody. Nothing too big has happened on the IBM i front as far as we know, excepting the appointment of a new vice president for product management for the Power Systems line, which we report on elsewhere in this issue. But a lot of little thing have happened in recent weeks that bear pointing out, including a whole lot of patching that you can get caught up on in the IBM i PTF Guide also elsewhere in this issue.

Let’s go through the IBM announcements relative to the Power Systems and IBM i customer base that we have encountered since our final edition of 2024.

Right off the bat, on January 1 of this new year, in announcement letter AD25-0087, Big Blue says that it is decreasing prices in selected global regions to compensate for foreign exchange rates. These price decreases, which apply to Power9 and Power10 systems as well as to IBM disk, flash, and tape storage, only affect three countries: Taiwan, South Africa, and Sri Lanka. The Taiwanese price list has been shaved by 0.1 percent (that’s a tenth of a point, not a typo), the South African price list has been shaved by 0.3 percent (three tenths of a point), and the Sri Lankan price list has been trimmed by 2 percent. The price changes in Taiwan and South African price changes seem to be hardly worth the trouble in a world gone mad with inflation, but there you have it.

The price decreases follow an increase in pricing for Power Systems hardware and software for the United States back on September 3 of last year, which went into effect on January 1 of this year and which presumably were also in effect around the globe for the same 6 percent uptick. A foreign exchange harmonization with the US dollar happened on September 3 for 21 countries, also effective on January 1. Taiwan, South Africa, and Sri Lanka did not see a foreign exchange harmonization. As far as we know, other countries – IBM does business in 180 countries, so that leaves 105 of them not spoken for – have not seen a ForEx harmonization. We reckon these cumulative price changes are all reflected in IBM’s eConfig system and that business partners are not having to do math to figure out what to charge customers.

OK, here’s a neat one. On November 24, in announcement letter AD24-2280, IBM issued an RPQ special order that allows customers buying Power S1012 or Power S1014 servers the ability to order an extra pair of 3.2 TB NVM-Express U.2 flash cards to provide operating system mirroring for IBM i. “This is RPQ is exclusive to IBM i customers that have purchased LPP 5733-ICC IBM Cloud Storage Solutions for i,” Big Blue says in the RPQ. “A total of two RPQs are required to ensure two NVMe devices are configured to provide IBM i data protection via software mirroring by the OS.” We are not sure why all IBM i systems don’t have mirrored flashes for the operating systems.

Here is another neat RFQ, dated January 7 in announcement letter AD25-0099, which added a special tracking indicator for the Indian Air Force to Power9 and Power10 systems as well as for other Asia/Pacific countries. Well, we didn’t know the Indian Air Force was a Power Systems user. But now we do. . . .

We didn’t know it at the time, but IBM has had a special deal since April last year to give customers in all of its geographies who buy 20 4.8 TB flash drives for their FlashSystem 7300 arrays an extra four drives for free. The RPQ is in announcement letter AD25-0109. We have no idea what forced the January 6 update of this offering, but we do know that it is only available for new base controllers and not for add-on flash enclosures or upgrades of existing FlashSystem 7300 iron.

This one is more of a general purpose Power Systems announcement and more of a sign of the times. In announcement letter AD24-2098, dated December 13 of last year, which was about the availability of the TXSeries for Multiplatforms 11.1 transaction processing software – CICS for non-mainframe platforms, essentially, at the bottom was the following statement: “IBM intends that future releases of IBM TXSeries for Multiplatforms will not support the AIX platform. IBM will continue to provide support for the AIX platform in the current release of IBM TXSeries for Multiplatforms 9.1 in accordance with IBM’s support lifecycle policy.”

With this announcement, TXSeries, which is distinct from the CICS Transaction Server for i used with the IBM i platform and from the core CICS software that dates from the dawn of time and is still obviously being used as a front-end on COBOL and Java applications on the System z mainframe, TXSeries Multiplatform is now only available on Linux. Which doesn’t really make it multiplatform, now does it?

Back in the day, the TXSeries Multiplatform variant of CICS was available for the Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX variants of Unix as well as Microsoft’s Windows Server and the core Red Hat and SUSE Linuxes. Now, it is just Linux, and probably really only Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You might not recall that IBM said last August that it was stopping full support for CICS Transaction Server for i effective on October 1 of this year. Perhaps IBM isn’t seeing any business moving CICS applications to IBM i or AIX platforms, or perhaps it is worried about making it easy for System z customers to change hardware platforms. We wonder how long before IBM will pull the plug on TXSeries for Linux.

One last thing. In announcement letter AD24-2309, dated December 10 of last year, IBM has launched ServicePac for IBM Power and Storage, which is bundled with Power iron and disk, flash, and tape storage products to speed up access to IBM specialists to help with installing, managing, and repairing these products. IBM says that the ServicePac offers:

Onsite hardware maintenance coverage that is 24 hours a day, seven days a week. IBM offers additional years of hardware maintenance coverage through ServicePac
Retention of defective media, such as hard drives and flash drives, that are being replaced (machine dependent)
Warranty service upgrades and warranty and maintenance options
Machine Setup Support Services for IBM Power and Storage Systems is an optional, independent service over and above base hardware and software support services (Basic Maintenance)

This is obviously over and above Software Maintenance (SWMA) and regular hardware maintenance, which are commonly acquired by IBM i shops when they get new machinery from Big Blue. What we don’t know is how much more expensive the ServicePac is than the combination of SWMA and hardware support for any given configuration of software. IBM doesn’t give prices out for many products anymore.

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