System i OS Upgrade Service
To take advantage of the latest features & functions and
keep your system fully supported Life's System i OS upgrade service
offers a fully inclusive, co-ordinated solution which is geared to
ensuring the success of the upgrade without disrupting your
business. It's a service that draws on the wealth of experience and
expertise that comes from undertaking such projects on a daily
basis.
V6R1 & V7R1
Every release of the System i operating system has a
finite support period. V5R4 was launched in February 2006 and
it recently reached its end of marketing date on the
27 May 2011. This means that customers can no
longer order V5R4 and new Power servers cannot be ordered with V5R4
pre-loaded. The end of support date for V5R4 is 30 September
2013.
V6R1 became available in March 2008 & IBM i V7R1 was
introduced in April 2010. To upgrade to V6R1 or V7R1 from earlier
versions requires a program conversion for all programs that use
the IBM i Machine Interface (MI).
This conversion upgrades and refreshes programs to take
advantage of the latest system enhancements, including enhanced
system integrity, improved performance, and a range of new
operating system and processor capabilities.
The System i community has experienced program conversion before
when moving from 48-bit address space to the 64-bit address space
in 1995. This was the CISC to RISC conversion where the instruction
set was changed from complex instruction set computing to reduced
instruction set computing.
The IBM i 6.1 program conversion is similar in some ways to the
CISC to RISC conversion, in order for a program to be converted,
its creation data (sometimes referred to as observability) must be
available.
Upgrade Service
As part of our upgrade service we complete a set of pre upgrade
tasks to identify any objects which won't convert and estimate how
long the conversion will take based on the CPW of your system. The
team then plan out any corrective actions required to ensure the
conversion can complete successfully.
We can also test the upgrade process on one of our servers
running V6R1, and make the server available to your users for
application testing. Once testing is complete we fully document an
implementation plan of what we'll do & how long it will take.
The upgrade is usually completed out of hours.