5 Reasons to Keep your IBMi PTFs And Technology Refreshes Up to Date

5 Reasons to Keep your IBMi PTFs And Technology Refreshes Up to Date We are concerned about the lack of attention among our iSeries customers who ignore IBM PTF and technology updates to keep their IBMi OS (OS400 / i5 / OS) up to date. Well, we understand the general justification - "The system is working fine and will be taken care of in the next release version. If it is not broken, do not repair it. Then why not wait?"

First, let us understand what "PTF" means. PTF is Program Temporary Fix. PTF is a software patch to fix "bugs" or "improvements" using IBM Licensed Software Products (LPPs), typically operating systems. The "temporary" part of this is a temporary fix until the next version of the operating system is released. At that point, a "fix" will be added to the new release code.

Technology updates can provide: - Support for new hardware and firmware (e.g., new I/O equipment or newly announced models) - Support for new virtualization functions - Performance improvements - Enable new functions

Starting with the V6R1, IBM has significantly slowed the pace of new OS releases to give its customers more time to evaluate and upgrade to the latest version (IBM has many customers worldwide struggling to upgrade to the new OS version in less than 3 years). So, instead of a new OS every two years, IBM introduces new functionality and fixes by releasing technology updates, or TR. This means that the old way of waiting for the next IBMi OS to update your PTF is more dangerous. Due to the long distances between IBMi OS versions, it is now important to stick with PTFs as new OS versions will take longer to release.

In addition to updating PTF levels, TRs add additional capabilities to existing operating systems.

For example, what has been added to V7R1 are user profile enhancements, object auditing improvements, data encryption, security enhancements, and updated programming tools. They were all delivered to V7R1 by TR. There were also several TRs for the V7R2.

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