Am in my first IBMi class literally right now. It seems completely different than the Windows/Linux systems I've used for the last 25 years.

There are techs from 2 other companies in attendance. Apparently IBMi is used widely in banking.

It was the only thing NOT totaled when we got hit with ransomware, and is what holds our PII for our clients/workers.

> It was the only thing NOT totaled when we got hit with ransomware, and is what holds our PII for our clients/workers.

Because it's actually more secure, or because it's so obscure that the malware didn't know what to do with it?

Some combination of the two. IBM i has its vulnerabilities, but because of the way that the OS is built, getting code execution accidentally is extremely difficult, and even getting native code to run given full access to the system requires mucking about with the objects on disk.

However, with IBM i comes PASE, which provides a AIX-like environment that can run most software built for AIX directly, and that's going to have the same sort of vulnerabilities as any other UNIX system. As far as I know, that's mostly used for new development, though, because developers don't like learning unfamiliar platforms.

Indeed. A lot of banks overhauled their core banking platforms to run on IBM i in the early to mid 90ies. It scales well and considered secure.

I’m curious about the IBM i. Anyone here who can comment on how to get started? You can’t exactly buy one of these systems off the shelf.

There's an IBM i hobbyist discord[1] full of friendly people who will be happy to help you out with learning or acquiring your own iron, or you can use any of a number of public-access systems. The main public access system is pub400[2], but there are at least three that are run by people in the discord. I run one of them, albeit with the worst uptime of the bunch; PM for details. And finally, you can find all of the docs for the system on IBM's site[3], though they can take some getting used to.

[1] https://discord.gg/MzYzSvzN, or #ibmi on freenode [2] https://pub400.com/ [3] https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_73/rza...

Get in touch with a 3rd party vendor. They can offer classes/training or point you to someone who can.

You could also take a look at IBM's redbooks. They're guides written by 3rd parties. http://redbooks.ibm.com/

And here are the IBM technical docs: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en

You can get used IBM Power servers on ebay, but they're pretty pricey. Not sure about licensing and such also, so you should look into that before buying.