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IBM i OS Upgrade to the latest version

IBM i OS Upgrade – To take advantage of the latest features & functions and keep your system fully supported Life’s IBM 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.

IBM i OS Upgrade: V7.2 & V7.3

Every release of the IBM i operating system has a finite support period. Support for V7.1 ends on the 30 April 2018.

To upgrade to V6R1 or above 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 IBM 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 program conversion to IBM i 6.1 or above 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.

IBM i OS Upgrade From V5R4 or Earlier

As part of our IBM i OS 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 IBM i OS Upgrade process on one of our servers running V6R1 or above, 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.

Key Benefits of V7.3

  • IBM Power Servers
  • Temporal support
  • Enhanced OLAP function
  • New Security Authority Collection
  • New functions & features in RPG IV
  • Git & Orion added to available open source environments
  • New version of IBM DB2 Web Query for i

IBM Global Financing

IBM Global Financing (IGF) helps you acquire the IT solutions that your business needs in the most cost-effective and strategic way possible. With LifeIT, IBM Global Financing (IGF) helps you acquire the IT solutions that your business needs in the most cost-effective and strategic way possible.

Choose from a variety of financing options to address your unique solution requirements and help manage your cash flow and assets.

What others say about us

“Having migrated from IBM Domino to Microsoft Office 360 (Business Cloud), we are delighted with the results – and have 1000 happy internal customers who much prefer Outlook to Domino. Life IT were flexible, fair and supportive when schedules had to change due to other Gurit projects.  We had direct access to engineers and technical staff and a dedicated team who were easy to work with.  The whole project was done in a very friendly environment and I would definitely recommend Life IT for these sorts of migration projects.”

Henrikki Häkkänen,
Global IT Services Manager — Gurit Services AG

“Without the professional and expert support of Life IT, we wouldn’t have had the quality product we now have. They gently but insistently pushed the boundaries of our assumptions during the analysis phase, getting us to challenge our mind-sets and think outside the box. They then worked seamlessly as part of our team and delivered to time and to budget – no mean feat”.

James Hacking
Head of Technical Services—HCSS

“As we’d already invested significantly in Lotus Notes and Domino, a solution that built on our existing investment and skills was ideal. Life IT understood what was important to us and delivered a solution that met our needs. We’ve already seen the number of ‘distress calls’ to the sales office reduce as our sales managers can easily access customer data off line wherever they are and we’ve had positive feedback all round about the ability to update their call reports instantly on the road.”

Colin Mosley
Head of IT—Polyflor

“The Life IT solution has provided us with a significant reduction in support and maintenance costs and is an easy to use, more resilient and more easily maintainable system. As a business that handles thousands of transactions a day from 12 different own brand or white label websites it was vital that the whole process was seamless and, with the renewal of the support and maintenance contract from our existing supplier looming, it was also vital that the project came in on deadline. Life IT achieved this and more as they provided us with additional MI functionality and supported our staff whilst transferring their skills.’

Andrew Kirkham
Head of IT Development—DLR

“Life IT are doing a great job providing a very professional and efficient service. They are almost silently efficient and just get things done – only escalating issues when necessary. Their expertise in the AS400 is a key strength ensuring a real depth to their service and they keep us up to date with advances in technology too. So from an AS400 perspective I have very little to worry about.”

John Geary
IT Service Delivery Manager

“After the restructure I was left with a critical resource gap which quickly needed filling, having worked with Life IT before I gave them a call. Their response was swift and efficient. They now work as a virtual Center Parcs help desk team providing a strength and depth of support. Their flexible working based on a time bank system is real value for money. So not only do I get an expert and efficient service, I have reduced my resource costs!”

Kerry Moakes
Head of IT—Center Parcs

“We wanted flexible support to ensure 24/7 cover and Life IT worked with us to deliver this. Life IT has become integrated into the Bentley way of working and their role has expanded into looking at the technical side of the application as well as the support. “Our relationship has been built up over a significant period of time and both sides have worked hard to develop a supplier/customer relationship that can be used as a model throughout Bentley. We are now in the position where we have a pro-active partnership, Life IT are treated as part of Bentley, and that is a credit to them”.

Chris Sayers
Senior IS Manager—Bentley Motors

Support options

From full 24 by 7 operations to month end support and holiday cover, we can tailor a fixed price solution to fit seamlessly with your IT department.

So we offer a wide range of technical support services including IBM i, System P, Domino and SQL Server, to proactively monitor the availability and performance of your systems within a fixed price contract.

The key to our Application Support is that it’s ‘tailored’ to your exact requirements, with the flexibility to increase the resources and hours of cover as required.

With a Life support contract, you have access to a multi-skilled team with hardware, operating system and application skills as well as the latest IBM i certifications.

We provide any combination of application, operational and technical support, no matter how current your environment is and no matter how long support is projected for.

Life IT offer bespoke managed Microsoft SQL Server support services which are tailored to our customer’s requirements to ensure their systems are optimized, stable and secure, as well as prepared for future upgrades and updates.

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