[size=18:70581b3005]IBM blows the lid off V5R3 at regional conference[/size:70581b3005]
Previously tight-lipped about future releases, IBM has begun to leak enhancement information about V5R3 and the unannounced next-generation iSeries hardware.
“We’ve been working very hard over the last two years on this release, and there’s no surprise that we will have an announcement this year. As you can see, we are in the process of rolling out V5R3 content [at the Northeast iSeries Users Group Conference],” says John Reed, director of iSeries product management at IBM and keynote speaker at the conference, held from March 22–24 in Framingham, MA.
Conference attendees had the opportunity to hear what’s in store for the next release of OS/400 directly from Reed and director of iSeries product marketing Stephanie Joy, and they also attended sessions with details on V5R3 enhancements (see “The cat’s out of the bag: Attendees briefed on V5R3 highlights” on page 2).
According to Reed, there are four “strategic pillars of focus” in V5R3:
1. Ease of use. Enhancements across the board — including the new browser-based iSeries Navigator, new database reorganization abilities, and enhanced support for SQL standards — focus on increasing usability. “This is a hallmark of the iSeries. As the world becomes more complex, there is an increased focus on integration and making things easier to use,” says Reed.
2. On Demand. Expected to expand its offerings beyond just adding extra processors on the fly, On Demand continues to be a focus area in V5R3. “We will continue this trend and offer more things as On Demand components— not just in this release, but in all future releases,” says Reed.
3. Integration. “The ‘i’ in iSeries stands for integration. As we move into a world where the iSeries can run four different operating systems — OS/400, Windows, Linux, and AIX — integration is the key,” says Reed. Examples of enhanced integration capabilities in V5R3 include the ability to view all partitions from a single iSeries Navigator view, increased database automation, and simplified setup of single sign-on with Enterprise Identity Mapping for Integrated xSeries offerings.
4. Business continuity. From new Cross Site Mirroring (XSM) of Independent Auxiliary Storage Pools to Fast Checkpoint Save While Active and enhanced journaling capabilities, IBM is ramping up iSeries availability in V5R3. “Today, shops are required to be up all the time, and because of this requirement, we are focused on business continuity and additional security,” says Reed.
The name game
Still adjusting to the AS/400 to iSeries name change, customers wonder whether IBM will again change the name once OS/400 and AIX reside on the same hardware. But IBM is keeping those cards close to its chest.
“There’s a lot of speculation about the naming. We don’t know what we are going to call it, but we pay people a lot of money to go into the market and evaluate our brand recognition; right now ‘i’ is a good letter to keep,” says Reed.
When will V5R3 be announced?
Also a mystery is the official announcement date for V5R3. Although many of the conference sessions included or focused on V5R3 content, and IBM keynote speakers John Reed and Stephanie Joy spoke about the anticipated release, customers received no official word on when they can expect to hear an OS/400 announcement.
Insider sources speculate an announcement date as early as April 20 or 27 and as late as Q4 — when the hardware is expected to be ready (since V5R3 documentation will reveal information about the unannounced hardware). However, in several conference sessions, IBMers speaking of the future release mentioned that the enhanced capabilities will be generally available in June or July.
| jj8610 回复于：2004-03-30 12:03:19 |
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A look ahead: [size=18:7c29f1d28e]The Insider's top iSeries technologies to watch in 2004[/size:7c29f1d28e]By Sarah Kimmel Monday, January 05, 2004 As we kick off 2004, new iSeries technologies are surfacing and older technologies are just starting to gain acceptance in the iSeries market. Watch for these key technologies in the New Year: AIX support on the iSeries. In April 2002, IBM announced via a Statement of Direction that it plans to include native support for AIX in iSeries logical partitions — a move some have called “the merging of the iSeries and pSeries.” IBM has stated that, while the two operating systems will run on the same hardware, the two product lines will remain separate entities. Insider sources close to IBM expect that AIX support will be added in the next release of OS/400, slated for Q2 2004, and its associated hardware, which is expected later in 2004. Time zone support begins in V5R3. The next release of OS/400, presumably called V5R3, is slated for announcement in Q2 2004. This release is expected to bring a number of key enhancements, including time zone support — a feature that iSeries shops have been looking forward to for years. The time zone enhancements are expected to come in two waves. The first, which is expected with V5R3, will allow shops to support approximately 65 time zones and will allow the iSeries to run in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) — a time scale that couples Greenwich Mean Time, which is based solely on the Earth’s inconsistent rotation rate, with highly accurate atomic time. The second wave, which is slated for a future release of OS/400, will allow iSeries shops to run multiple jobs in different time zones within a single partition. Regulatory compliance solutions and support. Whether it is with the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act for banks and financial services, HIPAA for healthcare, Sarbanes-Oxley for publicly traded companies, or The California Privacy Act (SB1386) for any business that has data about any California resident, the government is taking a much keener interest in how businesses are protecting customer data. Now IT managers have to worry not just about data corruption or theft by competitors, but also about sloppy security practices that could lead organizations to a public black eye or even jail time. To address this huge expenditure on IT, Big Blue and other vendors have announced support and services to help shops meet their compliance deadlines. Enhancements to CL. iSeries customers that have been requesting enhancements to CL are in luck in 2004. Structural enhancements, such as the ability to have more files in a program, as well as new structured commands, such as DOWHILE and DOUNTIL, will add a new flexibility to the language. Server consolidation. Server consolidation trends are in full swing and are expected to grow stronger through 2004. Logical partitioning capabilities, as well as the iSeries’ increased support for multiple platforms, will cause additional environments to be hosted on larger consolidation servers. Following this trend, some organizations are expected to also consolidate functions that were once spread across multiple teams into data centers under a single management structure. These consolidation strategies will increase the pressure for iSeries professionals to learn other platforms, including Windows, Unix, and Linux. Biometrics on the iSeries. Vendors, such as Daon and Tangent Solutions, offering biometric security solutions are targeting their products to the iSeries. These solutions use a set of unique personal identifiers, such as your fingerprints, voice, or eye’s iris, to identify users and log them onto certain systems, changing the way many iSeries shops will address user authentication in 2004 (IW 10/20/03). Additional availability alternatives. The iSeries High Availability market is now dominated by just a few leading vendors. In 2003, IBM extended and enhanced its presence in this market with the addition of a second tier to its High Availability/Business Continuity Value Add and the introduction of two new iSeries servers configured to cater to the availability needs in iSeries shops. In 2004, both of these developments are expected to gain acceptance and Insider sources close to IBM reveal that Big Blue will possibly build availability enhancements into OS/400 with V5R3 (IW 5/26/03, 7/28/03). |
| michael9406 回复于：2004-03-31 22:10:06 |
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