If you’re on older iron than POWER9 and IBM i 7.3 is your path forward, you need to read this.
By Steve Pitcher
On April 30, 2021, IBM i 7.2 goes end of service.
We’ve all heard about the carrot vs. the stick. The carrot is effectively positive reinforcement. You get a reward. The stick is negative reinforcement. You get punished.
A few short years ago, when IBM i 7.1 was going end of service in 2018, it seemed like I was doing an upgrade every single week. That’s actually not too far from the truth. 7.1 was released in 2010, and it was by far the most popular install base of IBM i at the time. Most customers were running POWER7 and POWER8 machines, so getting them to 7.2 or 7.3 wasn’t a hard stretch. And for the most part, there were a lot of reasons to get away from 7.1: the end of Java 6, poor cipher and protocol support, SMB1 being incredibly weak, the fact that the OS was eight years old.