Big Blue Finally Unveils First IBM i Tech Refreshes Of 2026
July 20, 2026 Alex Woodie
Well, that took a little longer than usual. Last week, IBM finally made its first IBM i Technology Refresh announcements of 2026, formally unveiling the group of updates that collectively will make up IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8. With the fall TR ostensibly just three months away, the good news with the two new TRs is that the general availability date is this Friday.
Since IBM moved to the TR cycle back in 2010, it has traditionally given the IBM i community two big updates per year, one in the spring (normally April) and one in the fall (normally October). This year played out just a bit differently, and IBM was good enough to give us a heads up back in April on the delay.
The reason for the delay is pretty simple: IBM wanted to announce the new entry-level Power server before it announced the new TR. One of the reasons for the TRs is to add support for new hardware to the OS, and IBM couldn’t add support in the upcoming new releases of IBM i for something that didn’t actually exist yet. IBM formally announced the new “Bonnell+” Power S1112 entry server on Wednesday, July 15, the same day that it announced the 2026 Summer TRs. (Apparently, Wednesday is the new Tuesday.)
You can read about the Power S1112 in Timothy Prickett Morgan’s story here. But if you stay on this page, we’ll give you the big picture for the new TRs. In the coming weeks, we’ll drill down deeper into the most pertinent features.
What’s New in 7.5 TR8 and 7.6 TR2
IBM didn’t deliver any earthshattering new capabilities with the Summer TR. Rather, it made incremental enhancements across a wide swath of the operating system and related facilities and licensed products.
Here are the highlights of the summer 2026 TRs in select categories:
Security: IBM added Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) capabilities with IBM i 7.6 TR2; this is not available on IBM i 7.5 or earlier releases. BYOK is enabled in IBM i Cryptographic Services via IBM Cloud Key Protect, IBM’s centralized cloud-based key management service.
“This is really targeted for those who are trying to run their IBM i in the cloud and have a compliance requirement where they have to have external key management,” said Tim Mullenbach, the IBM i security architect at IBM, during a webinar on the summer TR last week. “It’s also an option for you to run on-prem.”
Source: IBM
IBM added support for OAuth 2.0 with its integrated Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server. This capability, which is available in all OSes going back to IBM i 7.4, brings IBM i email up to current industry standards for email authentication.
“The SMTP team has been working furiously on enhancing that server so that you can use an OAuth-type capability to do the authentication. This is kind of a requirement from some of the big email server providers like Google and Office 365,” Mullenbach said. “There’s going to be more coming in this as we support more email server providers along the way. This is a useful thing as the world of security continues to change, and we have to continue to change right along with it.”
IBM is also delivering a new SQL service that will automatically poll the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database and return CVEs that impact the specific IBM i release for the user. Technically a table function in SYSTOOLS, the new CVE_INFO function returns a list of CVEs that could impact that system, along with additional information, such as the name of the vulnerability, when it was published, and the CVSS severity score.
“This was a personal area of interest for me, trying to find some way that we could use our SQL functions and RESTful services capabilities to more easily understand CVEs and the IBM i. And this is our first step forward,” said Scott Forstie, the Db2 for i database architect at IBM. “This was this was a huge endeavor for many of us in IBM, and I’m so happy that it’s going to be realized.”
Source: IBM
Database: IBM made several functional enhancements to Db2 for i with the new releases, launched 17 brand new IBM i services across SYSTOOLS and QSYS2, and enhanced 10 more. This is to be expected, as the IBM i server’s primary function is to be a database machine.
But there’s one IBM i service that really stands out, and which Forstie highlighted during his 13 allotted minutes of time: the new CREATE_DATA_JOURNAL_READER scalar function, which makes it easier to understand changes made to journaled database files.
“The concept here is inserts, updates, and deletes to a database file that’s journaled results in data journal entries in what? The data journal,” Forstie said in the webinar. “But when we look at those journal entries, it’s really hard to understand the row images and do something with them because the entry specific data is in hex. So we created this helper function. It will create a helper function for you for any table that you want to understand the data or journal entries.”
For instance, if a user wanted to know more about changes made in a file named “Toy Story library,” she doesn’t have to worry that the data is in hexadecimal format, because she can simply call the helper function created by the CREATE_DATA_JOURNAL_READER scalar function to generate the data in a format she can easily read.
“Yes, it was a long, cold winter in Minnesota,” Forstie said. “But some good things came out of it, including this create data journal reader.”
Access Client Solutions: IBM is now shipping ACS version 1.1.9.13, and including it as part of the 2026 summer TRs. This doesn’t appear to be a groundbreaking release, but it does include several new capabilities, including support for the SQL Error Logging Facility (SELF) within the Run SQL Scripts component of ACS. There are seven new SQL examples supporting SELF, including SQL related to system-wide controls, job-level controls, and log queries, among others.
Forstie’s database team has also added several more security-related SQL examples to Run SQL Scripts. These include SQL for determining who created objects in the IFS root or the /QOpenSys subdirectory; what IFS first-level directories and subdirectories that are open to attack; and who owns the IFS home directory.
“Yours truly and the ACS team have been working hard on adding in new SQL services examples to ACS, and one of the things that we’ve embraced is showing how SQL can be used to measure the security posture of your IBM i,” Forstie said. “I’ve called this ‘inject more security into your IBM i.’ Well, you can do that by using SQL to do some level checks to see what does my IBM i look like on this particular attack vector.”
You can see the list of all updates to ACS here.
Navigator for i: Several of the new features discussed above – including the BYOK, OAuth 2.0, and CVE SQL service — show up in the Navigator column. As the primary systems management interface for IBM i, many security-related functions can be accessed in Navigator.
IBM also overhauled the GUIs for hundreds of Performance Data Investigator (PDI) charts in Navigator. According to Tim Rowe, the architect in charge of Navigator and development tools, the upgrade charts from the old Dojo framework to use the Angular framework, which is what the current version of Navigator (i.e. “New Nav”) uses, will make it much it easier for users to understand how the performance of their IBM i server is changing over time.
“It is way better. It allows you to actually look at a graph, look at the data without losing the graph,” Rowe said. “It works as one would expect in a modern Web interface. You can even use things like favorites now.”
Source: IBM
Users can also view database output in a Jupyter notebook, thanks to the support for the Code for i database extension within Navigator. “Navigator now supports the viewing and exchange of these Jupyter notebooks,” Rowe said. “As opposed to just a table of raw data, you could get a pretty picture, like a bar graph or a line graph or a pie graph.”
For more info on the updates to Navigator, click here.
Migrate While Active: IBM made major improvements to Migrate While Active, the product that launched back in October 2024 to allow customers to continue running their IBM i workloads while they migrate their data to PowerVS. Since then, the product has expanded to support on-prem migrations.
MWA is based on IBM’s Db2 Mirror continuous availability product, but uses TCP/IP as the communication mechanism as opposed to the ultra-low latency of RDMA Over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) that Db2 Mirror uses.
MWA uses multiple replication mechanisms to establish the target copy, including traditional save/restore or using virtual tape methods; it also support partition mirroring, which was added about a year ago.
With this TR, IBM is adding support for external storage-based replication technologies, including FlashCopy and Global Copy. “If you’re just staying on prem and you’re not doing any migration, we imagine FlashCopy is going to be the most popular way,” said Kris Whitney, who just took over from Steve Will as the chief architect for IBM i.
Another enhancement for MWA: Support for operating system upgrades. Customers can now upgrade their IBM i OS as part of an MWA-based migration. “After you have that copy of that second system, we will start tracking all the changes that happen on the source side. Now you can go over to that target node and you can do an upgrade,” Whitney said.
MWA also brings new “estimation and user experience enhancements,” which IBM says will allow customers to more easily plan and navigate through the migration phases. For more info on MWA, click here.
Code for i: The popular Web-based development environment is continually updated throughout the year. IBM highlighted more than a dozen updates in its TR documents, such as support for SSH key passphrases and a new context view in Code for i proper; an improved schema browser in the database extension; and better support for RPG and CL; among other improvements. For more info on enhancements to Code for i, click here.
As previously noted, we’ll be diving into 2026 summer TRs in depth over the coming weeks. In the meantime you can peruse the IBM announcement materials below:
- IBM i 7.6 TR2 Software Announcement
- IBM i 7.6 TR2 in-depth description on IBM Support
- IBM i 7.5 TR8 software announcement
- IBM i 7.5 TR8 in-depth description on IBM Support
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