InterSystems is very pleased to announce the 2021.1 release of InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, InterSystems IRIS for Health and HealthShare Health Connect, which are now Generally Available to our customers and partners.
The enhancements in this release offer developers more freedom to build fast and robust applications in their language of choice, both server-side and client-side. This release also enables users to consume large amounts of information more effectively through new and faster analytics capabilities.
We expect many customers and partners to upgrade their Caché and Ensemble deployments to this InterSystems IRIS release and have made every effort to make that a smooth and worthwhile transition. Most applications will see immediate performance benefits just from running on InterSystems IRIS, even before they explore the many powerful capabilities IRIS brings to the table.
We kindly invite you to join our webinar presenting the highlights of the new release, at 11AM EDT on June 17. The webinar will be recorded and made available for replay afterwards. Or listen to our Data Points podcast episode on what's new in 2021.1.
Release Highlights
With InterSystems IRIS 2021.1, customers can deploy InterSystems IRIS Adaptive Analytics, an add-on product that extends InterSystems IRIS to provide business users with superior ease of use and self-service analytics capabilities to visualize, analyze, and interrogate vast amounts of data to get the information they need to make timely and accurate business decisions, without being experts in data design or data management. Adaptive Analytics transparently accelerates analytic query workloads that run against InterSystems IRIS by autonomously building and maintaining interim data structures in the background.
Other spotlight features new in this release include:
- Improved manageability for our External Language Servers, which now also cover R and Python. This gateway technology enables robust and scalable leveraging of server-side code in your language of choice
- The InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO) offers declarative configuration and automation for your environments, and now also supports deploying InterSystems System Alerting & Monitoring (SAM).
- InterSystems API Manager v2.3, including an improved user experience, Kafka support and hybrid mode.
- Mainstream availability of IntegratedML, enabling SQL developers to build and deploy Machine Learning models directly in a purely SQL-based environment.
- Support for stream fields on sharded tables, giving you full SQL schema flexibility on InterSystems IRIS horizontally scalable architecture
- An iris-lockeddown container image, implementing many security best practices such as disabling web access to the management portal and appropriate OS-level permissions.
- Support for Proof Key for Code Exchange (PKCE) for Oauth 2.0
InterSystems IRIS for Health 2021.1 includes all of the enhancements of InterSystems IRIS. In addition, this release further extends the platform's comprehensive support for the FHIR® standard through APIs for parsing & evaluating FHIRPath expressions against FHIR data. This is in addition to the significant FHIR-related capabilities released since 2020.1, including support for FHIR Profiles, FHIR R4 Transforms and the FHIR client API.
This release also includes HealthShare Health Connect, our InterSystems IRIS for Health based integration engine that delivers high-volume transaction support, process management, and monitoring to support mission critical applications. For a detailed overview of how its feature set compares to InterSystems IRIS for Health, please see here.
More details on all of these capabilities can be found in the product documentation, which has recently been made even easier to navigate through a convenient Table of Contents sidebar.
If you are upgrading from an earlier version and use TLS 1.3, please see these upgrade considerations.
How to get the software
InterSystems IRIS 2021.1 is an Extended Maintenance (EM) release and comes with classic installation packages for all supported platforms, as well as container images in OCI (Open Container Initiative) a.k.a. Docker format.
Full installation packages for each product are available from the WRC's product download site. Using the "Custom" installation option enables users to pick the options they need, such as InterSystems Studio and IntegratedML, to right-size their installation footprint.
Container images for the Enterprise Editions of InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS for Health and all corresponding components are available from the InterSystems Container Registry using the following commands:
docker pull containers.intersystems.com/intersystems/iris:2021.1.0.215.0
docker pull containers.intersystems.com/intersystems/iris-ml:2021.1.0.215.0
docker pull containers.intersystems.com/intersystems/irishealth:2021.1.0.215.0
docker pull containers.intersystems.com/intersystems/irishealth-ml:2021.1.0.215.0
For a full list of the available images, please refer to the ICR documentation.
Container images for the Community Edition can also be pulled from the Docker store using the following commands:
docker pull store/intersystems/iris-community:2021.1.0.215.0
docker pull store/intersystems/iris-ml-community:2021.1.0.215.0
docker pull store/intersystems/irishealth-community:2021.1.0.215.0
docker pull store/intersystems/irishealth-ml-community:2021.1.0.215.0
Alternatively, tarball versions of all container images are available via the WRC's product download site.
InterSystems IRIS Studio 2021.1 is a standalone IDE for use with Microsoft Windows and can be downloaded via the WRC's product download site. It works with InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS for Health version 2021.1 and below. InterSystems also supports the VSCode ObjectScript plugin for developing applications for InterSystems IRIS with Visual Studio Code, which is available for Microsoft Windows, Linux and MacOS.
Other standalone InterSystems IRIS 2021.1 components, such as the ODBC driver and web gateway, are available from the same page.
Sharing your experiences
We only get to announce one EM release per year, so we are excited to see this version now hitting the GA milestone and eager to hear your experiences with the new software. Please don't hesitate to get in touch through your account team or here on the Developer Community with any comments on the technology or the use cases you're addressing with it.
For selected new capabilities and products, we've set up Early Access Programs to allow our users to evaluate software before it gets released. Through these focused initiatives, we can learn from our target audience and ensure the new product fulfills their needs when it gets released. Please reach out through your account team or watch the Developer Community if you're interested in participating in any of these.
