Re: Other vendors on IBM i 7.1

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 16:20, <rob@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Suggest they also contact IBM about their vendor early ship program. ÂIf
they choose not to make the investment in enough hardware to support not
only the versions of OS they are supporting but also early ship, they
might be able to get in some program and access a cloud.

Besides, it's not like that's such a big effort. We usually test
releases this way:

Install the beta on one of the 520s we have lying around.
Copy or development environment to this machine.
Run all QA.

Upgrade to the next beta.
Run All QA.

Repeat until GA.
Run All QA.

A few weeks after GA, upgrade our main test system. This is what our
product engineers use daily to validate configurations, test out
stuff, reproduce customer issues, etc.

As an interesting side note, validating our software on 7.1 required
no changes at all. And validating at 6.1 required a few very minor
changes, most of which affected only fringe functionality (e.G.
certain SSL scenarios).

I would _like_ to upgrade our production system, but it also runs
third party software which isn't supported on 7.1.

All our software is ILE RPG, C and C++.

I think vendors are just lazy. We already sold 4 machines in the past
few months with 7.1 on it.