i5/OS V6R1 Technical Overview

January 2008 Announcements

January 2008, IBM announced a new major release of the i5/OS operating system - V6R1. This is approximately 2 years after the initial announcements of V5R4 and the then newest POWER5 processor technology System i and System p models. Together with the POWER6 processor technology 570 model introduced during 2007 and more POWER6 models to be introduced during 2008, V6R1 contains exactly the range of enhancements customers would expect in a new major release.

Key V6R1 new and enhanced functions are highlighted in the following areas:

• i5/OS security: This includes expanded "base security" options, greatly expanded network Intrusion Detection options, and optional encryption of data on disk and tape-based backups
• Virtualization of i5/OS storage: This includes V6R1 as a client using virtual I/O hosted by either another V6R1 partition or a Power Virtualization (PowerVM™) Virtual I/O Server partition
• Backup and recovery and system availability: This includes more save while active options, and journaling and clustering options that enable more flexible save and restore operations and backup (high availability) system configurations - and new IBM offerings with the IBM High Availability Solutions Manager (HASM) and the IBM DataMirror iCluster for the IBM System i products
• Improved performance when using SAN-attached IBM System Storage™ attached disks and new POWER6-based SAN I/O adapters
• IBM DB2® for i5/OS® functional and performance enhancements
• Improved Java performance
• ILE RPG and COBOL enhancements
• New IBM Rational Developer for System i, the workstation development tool that is the follow-on to the WebSphere Development Studio Client (WDSC) development tools
• Easier "basic" enablement for those starting to deploy their applications on the Web