• Power Systems Turns In Another Great Quarter

  November 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been saying for some time that we think that Big Blue can get the Power Systems hardware business, including servers and operating systems but not including various kinds of tech support, to rise above $2 billion in annual sales. And by all indications, now that IBM has turned in three of the four quarters for the year, it looks like 2026 will indeed be that year.

  “Storage delivered record revenue growth and continue to gain market share with broad-based demand across Flash, Fusion, tape and IBM Z storage,” explained James Kavanaugh, IBM’s chief financial officer, explained on a …

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• Big Blue Is Right On Schedule With Fall 2026 IBM i Tech Refreshes

  November 2, 2026 Alex Woodie

  After delaying the spring Technology Refreshes for three months earlier this year, IBM is back on track with the fall TRs. IBM i shops will find a raft of new capabilities in the newly announced IBM i 7.6 TR3 and 7.5 TR9, including new services for tracking security patches, performance improvements for networking and storage, and sundry other improvements up and down and across the stack.

  Big Blue announced IBM i 7.6 TR3 and IBM i 7.5 TR9 on October 27, and plans to deliver the new capabilities and updates on November 20, although some components of the announcement will …

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• Guru: Environment Variables – Global Variables Wearing Hiking Boots

  November 2, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  Sometimes a program knows one tiny piece of information that another program, several calls farther down the stack, needs to know.

  The obvious solution is to add another parameter. But sometimes that requires that new parameter added to one or more programs in the call stack. Before long, we’re passing a mushroom basket through half the forest even though most of the programs along the way have no interest in what’s inside it.

  There is another option that has been available on IBM i for a very long time: environment variables. IBM i supports both job-level and system-level environment variables. …

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• A New IBM i Entity Takes Shape: Power By Fortra

  November 2, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Attendees of the COMMON NAViGATE conference last week were able to catch a glimpse of a new organization making its way in the IBM i world: Power by Fortra. The entity is not a separate company from Fortra. Rather, it’s a virtual carveout of sorts of all of Fortra’s IBM i products as well as its IBM i-focused employees. And according to Power by Fortra general manager Geoff Fischer, it’s here to stay.

  “We’re still a part of Fortra,” Fischer told IT Jungle in a recent interview about Power by Fortra rebrand. “We’re still a business unit within Fortra. Nothing …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 38

  November 2, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to this week, where the IBM i platform has two issues you need to be aware of as well as a security bulletin. Yup, we said “a” there, meaning only one, meaning it looks like people were out trick or treating instead of bug hunting. Which is fine.

  The first issue is related to Access Client Services. IBM has put out a note that warns: “Versions 1.1.9.1 through 1.1.9.16 are vulnerable to memory exhaustion via a malicious SFTP server sending unsolicited replies. The SFTP client (Apache MINA SSHD) did not verify that incoming replies corresponded to previously sent requests …

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• Critical PHP2Shell Security Vulns Evoke ‘Black October’

  October 26, 2026 Alex Woodie

  AI helped uncover a pair of critical security vulnerabilities in PHP that can be used to execute code, including on IBM i servers, sent administrators around the world scrambling to install patches on a large swath of the Internet’s Web servers before cybercriminals can get to them. The flaws, along with the rapid dissemination of AI-based exploit code, led some organizations to simply unplug their websites, earning the whole episode the name “Black October.”

  On October 21, patches for two critical security vulnerabilities in PHP were released. The two vulns, CVE-2026-109619 and CVE-2026-109618, collectively called PHP2Shell, each garnered a …

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• Why Fortra Partnered with FalconStor to Launch Continuity Care: A Validated Recovery Service for IBM i

  October 26, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With over 7,000 Power Systems customers, Fortra is one of the largest software conglomerates serving the IBM i and AIX communities and it is by far the largest supplier of systems software for Power Systems. The company is also a key development partner of Big Blue, having nine years ago taken over enhancements to Rational Developer for i, Backup, Recovery and Media Services (BRMS) on i, and PowerHA SystemMirror for i.

  As such, Fortra is a perfect partner for FalconStor Software as it seeks to expand the use of its Habanero off-site data protection SaaS and its related Cloud Clean …

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• Guru: Analyzing User Session Statistics, Part 2

  October 26, 2026 Mike Larsen

  In part one of this tip, I showed how to determine the number of times a user signed in and signed out of IBM i for a given period. In this tip, I will show how to get the days a user signed in, and how long their session was active.

  I use the same table function, QSYS2.HISTORY_LOG_INFO, as before. The code (Figure 1 below) is similar to the code used in the first part of this series, but there are some differences I will point out.

  Note that I purposely left the user ID out of the result set …

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• Fresche Launches OpsIQ, a Free AI-Based Operation Assistant for IBM i

  October 26, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers have embraced AI-based coding tools, such as IBM’s Bob and Anthropic’s Claude Code, but IBM i administrators so far haven’t benefited from the AI productivity boost in the same way. That is starting to change, and one of the first AI-based administrative helpers is a free tool launched recently by Fresche called OpsIQ.

  OpsIQ is an AI assistant designed to help IBM i users get answers to questions about their systems. It is currently a read-only tool for helping users interrogate the system for information about server configurations, the state of jobs, and errors or alerts, which …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 37

  October 26, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  Well, brace yourself. We have two things you need to be aware of and a slew, an absolute slew, of security vulnerabilities in the IBM i stack.

  To begin with, IBM System Planning Tool for POWER processor-based systems – SPT Version 6.26.286.0 is available for download. You can get it HERE.

  And then there is Potential WebSphere Application Server problems when deployed behind a WebSphere-aware proxy server, where a WebSphere application running behind a HTTP proxy server may begin experiencing failures with client certificate based authentication, or if client IP addresses or connection information are reported incorrectly as those …

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