IBM Updates IBM i 7.1 with PTFs for New Power7 Machines
October 4, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It was a busy month for IBM and its team of PTF programmers, according to Doug Bidwell, who puts together the System i PTF Guide for you to keep track of Big Blue’s PTF patches for i5/OS and IBM i operating systems. In the latest PTF Guide, which you can see here, if you drill down into the Technology Refresh, you will see that Big Blue has delivered the patches to i 7.1 that allow the operating system and its database to run on the new Power7-based Power 710, 720, 730, 740, and 795 machines. The patches are also necessary if you want to use the new 283 GB i-formatted disk drive and the 177 GB flash-based storage module with an integrated SAS RAID controller, which I told you all about here. There are a bunch of drivers for other Ethernet and Fibre Channel adapter cards and the new 1.5 TB LTO5 tape drive in there, too. You might not take a look at the System i PTF Guide as religiously as you do the other Four Hundred stack newsletters, which is why I am pointing this out even though the Technology Refresh shipped on September 10. (I missed it, too, even though Doug Bidwell, who runs IBM i business partner DLB Associates and who puts together the guide, did not.) The PTF patches for i 7.1 includes performance enhancements for SSDs, the ability to install new partitions from network images on Power7 servers, and unspecified functional enhancements “to enable future extensions.” I’d be careful loading that one. There are also a whole new set of rolled up HIPER PTF fixes since i 7.1 was launched in April; last week’s set has four more PTFs that were added on September 28. There’s been some activity on i 6.1 and i 6.1.1 as well as on i5/OS V5R4 throughout the summer, and as always, you can monitor the PTFs through the PTF Guide. Our thanks, once again, to Doug for his efforts in putting this together every week. RELATED RESOURCES System i PTF Guide–September 25, 2010: Volume 12, Number 39 System i PTF Guide–September 18, 2010: Volume 12, Number 38 System i PTF Guide–September 11, 2010: Volume 12, Number 37 System i PTF Guide–September 4, 2010: Volume 12, Number 36 System i PTF Guide–August 28, 2010: Volume 12, Number 35 System i PTF Guide–August 21, 2010: Volume 12, Number 34
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