Welcome to Release Day 2024.1 

These pages are designed to give you highlights of the innovative new features now available within the latest versions of the solutions you rely on. The products you use on a daily basis fall within suites that solve similar business requirements. These suites fall into three major portfolios, Infrastructure Protection & Data Security, Intelligence & Automation, and IBM i & Additional products. This new structure has been created to build solutions that meet specific organizational needs, and ultimately create the best experience for our customers.

You'll notice a Fortra Release Rocket beside some release announcements, denoting a major release. Note that you'll still see timely bug fixes and minor releases throughout the year to provide you with the best usability and experience for your Fortra products. 

Click through the left hand navigation below to see what's new!

 

 

The Latest from IBM Partnership

Our team at Fortra works alongside IBM in developing solutions offered directly to IBM customers. The products that Fortra contributes to primarily assist customers with achieving business continuity and preventing downtime in the event of a disaster or planned maintenance. Users of the products produced by our partnership with IBM can expect continuous application availability and a reliable, streamlined system for performing backups and recovery.  

Recent product releases include: 

  • IBM PowerHA System Mirror for IBM i Version 7.5 HA 5.4.2 PTF SI85215 and IBM PowerHA System Mirror for IBM i Version 7.4 HA 4.10.2 PTF SI85162 
    • Integrated tracking of jobs for user-specified job queues, allowing for easy resubmission of incomplete jobs following a failure with the following enhancements: 
      • Added simple user-defined tracking with the ability to start and end tracking for specified job queues to enable automatic tracking of job lifecycle information using the new Start Tracking Job Queue (STRTRKJOBQ) and End Tracking Job Queue (ENDTRKJOBQ) commands. 
      • Enhanced visibility into the status of active or recently active jobs at the time of a failure using the new Work with ASP Job Queue (WRKASPJOBQ) command. Simplified resubmission of tracked jobs through the WRKASPJOBQ interface enable quicker system recovery. 
    • Improved performance for the Print Admin Domain MRE (PRTCADMRE) command with information detail (DETAIL) *RSC is used. 
    • The number of joblogs produced by PowerHA automated health checks has been reduced so that joblogs are no longer produced during successful operations. 
    • As part of the IBM i product portfolio simplification strategy, the PowerHA product no longer validates 5770-SS1 option 41 - HA Switchable resources licenses directly. 
    • PowerHA license management checking is improved to reduce the number of messages displayed in certain scenarios. 
  • Fixes for IBM PowerHA System Mirror for IBM i Version 7.5 HA 5.4.2 PTF S185215: 
    • Resolved a pair of issues with option 22 failures on the Work with ASP Copy Descriptions (WRKASPCPYD) display: 
    • Option 22 could fail with CPD0043 indicating the TGTNODE parameter does not exist. 
    • Option 22 would fail with HAE009A when a session contains multiple IASP devices. 
    • Resolved an issue where PowerHA session commands and SQL services could cause the QHASVR job to end. 
    • Software errors reported in PowerHA have been enhanced to include the joblog for the QHASVR job by default. 
    • Resolved an issue where Print Admin Domain MRE (PRTCADMRE) could fail with CPF7304 when printing monitored resources to *OUTFILE in instances where the size of the file was set to *NOMAX. PRTCADMRE no longer fails in this instance. 
    • Issue where some security scanning tools may have incorrectly identified an error indicating the server allowed access to .htaccess and .htpasswd. While there was no security issue, the server now returns an improved response to prevent false positives in these security scanning tools. 
    • PowerHA helptext has been corrected to indicate that callers of the following commands no longer need *READ authority to the SSH key file: ADDSVCCPYD, CHGSVCCPYD, DSPSVCCPYD, RTVSVCCPYD, STRSVCSSN, CHGSVCSSN, DSPSVCSSN, and RTVSVCSSN. The only user that requires *READ access to the SSH key file is QHAUSRPRF. 
    • An improved message is displayed when a PowerHA node is not at a compatible PowerHA version or modification level when starting the cluster node. 
    • PowerHA is simplified to only allow adding a node as the last backup in a cluster resource group recovery domain. The node role element in the Add CRG Node Entry (ADDCRGNODE) command now only allows a value of *LAST. In addition, *PRIMARY is no longer allowed as the node role for the newly added node. Any existing CL programs that specified this element on the ADDCRGNODE command may require modification. 
  • Fixes for IBM PowerHA System Mirror for IBM i Version 7.4 HA 4.10.2 PTF SI85162: 
    • Resolved an issue where PowerHA session commands and SQL services could cause the QHASVR job to end. 
    • Software errors reported in PowerHA have been enhanced to include the joblog for the QHASVR job by default. 
    • Resolved an issue where Print Admin Domain MRE (PRTCADMRE) could fail with CPF7304 when printing monitored resources to *OUTFILE in instances where the size of the file was set to *NOMAX. PRTCADMRE no longer fails in this instance. 
    • Issue where some security scanning tools may have incorrectly identified an error indicating the server allowed access to .htaccess and .htpasswd. While there was no security issue, the server now returns an improved response to prevent false positives in these security scanning tools. 
    • An improved message is displayed when a PowerHA node is not at a compatible PowerHA version or modification level when starting the cluster node. 
    • PowerHA is simplified to only allow adding a node as the last backup in a cluster resource group recovery domain. The node role element in the Add CRG Node Entry (ADDCRGNODE) command now only allows a value of *LAST. In addition, *PRIMARY is no longer allowed as the node role for the newly added node. Any existing CL programs that specified this element on the ADDCRGNODE command may require modification. 
  • Rational Developer for i 9.8.0.1 
    • Support added for COBOL outlines. 
    • Support and RDi community links added to Help menu. 
    • Added support for ILE Doc so that ILE RPG source can be documented in a way similar to Javadoc. From Window>Show View, open ILE Doc view (IBM-I-59). 
    • Connection information now included in editor tabs and the menu bar for the current source edited (IBM-I-3175). 
    • RPG Fall 2023 Currency. For details, see https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/rpg-cafe. 
    • Enhancements 
    • IBM Java updated to version 11.0.20.1 
    • Updated to Access Client Solutions version 1.1.9.4. 
    • Better control of comments included in hover help for definitions (IBM-I-493). 
    • Unused definition annotations can be suppressed if preferred by using the @ignore-unused tag (IBM-I-540). 
    • Allow Refactor Rename to wrap lines when the new length is longer than the record length added (IBM-I-386). 
    • The .bnd file type is now included by default in the Files table (IBM-I-3675). 
    • Improved defaults for IBM i member search. The new defaults are * for an initial search or the name of the last searched member for any subsequent searches (IBM-I-3729). 
  • Backup, Recovery, and Media Services (BRMS) PTF 7.5 SI84876, 7.4 SI84875, 7.3 SI84874 
    • In version 7.3 and later: 
    • Cloud volume setup instructions have been moved to their own step in recovery reports for cloud backups. See the BRMS wiki for more information. 
    • Fixed issue with using WRKMEDIBRM to submit a restore of individual objects from a parallel backup that was incorrectly submitting two restore jobs. 
    • Fixed restores of a parallel item from a duplicate volume set that may fail with messages MSGCPA6798. 
    • Fixed issue where the WRKMEDIBRM sequence of selecting Option 7, Option 5 then F10 was not showing any volumes. 
    • Fixed issue where cloud restores requiring more than 30 volumes to restore a saved item may fail with message MSGMCH1210. 
    • Resolved issue where a control group incremental backup forces a full save that incorrectly posts message MSGCPF387A. 
    • Fixed issue where STRMNTBRM with parameter MOVMED(*YES) incorrectly transferred expired cloud volumes. 
    • In version 7.5: 
    • Fixed issue with WRKMEDBRM OUTPUT(*PRINT) using more than one media class on the MEDCLS() parameter but only showing output for the first media class. 

 

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