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Cloud Pak for Integration 2022.2.1 delivers years of support for your business

By Leif Davidsen posted Fri June 10, 2022 12:59 PM

  

Everyone has their own tastes in music. It could be classical, or 80s power ballads, or some heavy rock, or maybe some indie music. (80s music is clearly the best). But picking a selection of music that works together can be tricky. You don’t want to just listen to the same song. But equally a totally random set of discordant music and tunes doesn’t work well. You might create different playlists to meet your moods. In the old days the album (LP) would have been designed for listening to as a complete item. Some of these will have greater staying power than others. You are unlikely to listen to Christmas music playlists in July, but you might have a ‘mixtape’ playlist that works for lots of different uses: working out, cooking, driving, chilling. And you can come back to that again and again as it always has the right mix of music.

That’s what IBM has just announced with Cloud Pak for Integration 2022.2.1. Normally I would blog about the announcement on the day the letter is published. This week also saw the Hursley Summit for European customers which was very well attended with no far off 100 customers and partners as well as numerous IBM experts together in Hursley House. It was just like past events and we even had some nice weather too.

 

This latest Cloud Pak for Integration release is a new Long Term Support Release (LTSR). Unlike application versions which can be more rapidly deployed and removed, the integration connecting core parts of the business infrastructure tends to be more long-lived and even if integration components have been containerized and are completely decoupled, there can be a preference to reduce the number of migrations to apply to the integration instances. Having the ability to deploy integration components and get support on them for up to 2 years helps address this. As part of this move, it will be possible to move between supported OpenShift EUS releases (even numbered OCP releases) to ensure that the complete stack is supported for 2 year period. And if you want to continue to deploy the integration products ‘standalone’ not as part of Cloud Pak for Integration on OpenShift you can continue to benefit from each product’s support lifecycle (including those with a 5+3 policy).

Aside from Cloud Pak for Integration being now available as a LTSR what else is part of the announcement? There are a number of additional enhancements and new features covering both Cloud Pak for Integration itself, the components within Cloud Pak for Integration and also the separate integration product offerings.

 

For Cloud Pak for Integration customers, they will find it easier to deploy as the requirement for the Platform Navigator to have access to RWX storage has been removed. This could be an issue in the past when deploying on public cloud, so by enabling deployment with RWO storage this restriction is removed. Also in the storage area there is a new offer for software-defined storage. There is now 12 months access to Spectrum Fusion (6TB primary storage including OpenShift Data Foundation essentials, 6 TB backup storage and 6TB metadata management). This doesn’t impact existing customers with access to the previous offer. This offer is only available for new customers of Cloud Pak for Integration for their initial purchase.

Also, for Cloud Pak for Integration customers there are enhancements that provide new value when deploying API Connect under the Cloud Pak for Integration entitlement. There is now the option to deploy the API Connect Portal and Manager on z IFLs running OpenShift. This allows customers who are providing API-led access to z assets and data to have the API access closer to the assets. Additionally, there are improvements to the co-authoring support, making it easier when creating new APIs and the associated access to data. And for API test generation there are new features extending the ‘auto test assist’ capability to make it possible to run more tests automatically with targeted data to provide more extensive test coverage without taking additional resources or skills. Deployments of API Connect can now take advantage of 2-site DR configurations.

 

Customers deploying App Connect under the Cloud Pak for Integration entitlement get additional Smart Connectors, including the ability to use Connectors with the Toolkit and not just Designer. And for some outstanding innovation we would encourage customers to look at ‘Goal Oriented Flow Assist (GOFA)’. Imagine your business needs a new integration flow created to meet a business need. Your business team knows what they want, but there are only a few integration specialists and getting time with them will delay progress. With GOFA the business team can simply write in English text what they want to do and the desired flow will be created as they type to match their description. This will help to accelerate progress, and the integration specialists will now have much less to do when they are available to work on this integration.

For Event-led integration there are updates to align with the latest levels of Open Source components. A later version of Kafka is now supported as well as newer versions of APICurio and Strimzi support is updated for use with OAuth for identity and authorization checks.

 

Aspera High Speed Transfer Server gets updated to V4.3 and also now leverages the Foundation Services Audit Logging which ensures that Aspera logs can be collected and reviewed alongside other logs.

 

As well as updates to Cloud Pak for Integration as described above there are additional new enhancements and updates to the integration components outside Cloud Pak for Integration. IBM MQ announced V9.3 which is also a new LTSR, making the many new features delivered in the 9.2.x CD stream available for the LTSR customers.

 

For API Connect customers they have a new LTSR release as well (10.0.5) and also API Connect will be available as a SaaS offering on AWS at the end of June.

 

DataPower have announced a new physical appliance – the X3.

 

App Connect for Manufacturing gets an update to support App Connect 12 and to offer new license terms and deployment options.

 

And finally, Aspera Enterprise on Demand gets an update to align better with other IBM subscriptions.

 

Going back to our music analogy, this is an incredible ‘full-stack’ playlist. Good for every occasion, every integration need and every season. With this you won’t be forced to listen to Christmas music in July. Or find your business trying to update resources using APIs, or deploying Java gateways in the DMZ.

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