How IBM Bolstered IBM i Resilience In The Summer Tech Refreshes

August 3, 2026 Alex Woodie

The capability to weather disruptions is a hallmark of the IBM i platform and a major reason why so many companies around the world rely on it to run their businesses. To that end, IBM has enhanced the platform’s resilience capabilities as part of the recent Technology Refresh announcements with updates to Migrate While Active and the BRMS facility, as well as bringing a new VTL to IBM i.

As mentioned in our first story about the 2026 Summer TRs, IBM has updated Migrate While Active, which it originally announced back in October 2024 as a variant of the Db2 Mirror continuous availability product.

Instead of using superfast Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) commands over super low-latency RDMA Over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) lines to keep the possibility of lost transactions in the event of a system outage as close to zero as possible – as the standard Db2 Mirror product does – MWA uses good old TCP/IP to transport database and application changes asynchronously to a target (at a much greater distance than RoCE allows). When the user is ready to complete the migration after performing maintenance or other activity, she can then execute the full switchover at her leisure.

IBM introduced a few new capabilities to MWA with the Summer TRs. For starters, users can now perform an operating system upgrade as part of the migration process. This is useful for minimizing downtime, even if users aren’t moving to a new box or moving to IBM Power Virtual Server (PowerVS) cloud environment, according to new IBM i chief architect Kris Whitney.

“As part of that migration, whether I’m moving to the cloud, moving to a new piece of hardware, or maybe I’m not even going to move to a new piece of hardware, I’m moving to a new operating system. How do I use some of this technology to reduce my downtime?” Whitney said in a recent Fortra webinar.

Migrate While Active minimizes downtime for IBM i migrations.

Another new feature in MWA is the introduction of additional methods for creating the target system copy in the first place. In addition to existing save/restore and manual methods, customers can now leverage external storage-based replication technologies, including FlashCopy and Global Copy, to create that initial image. Whitney expects FlashCopy to be the most popular method among users.

IBM also added more OS support in MWA for partition mirroring.

Partition mirroring introduced a new host-based asynchronous storage replication technology that lives below the technology-independent machine interface (TIMI) underneath the IBM i operating system, and brings some advantages to MWA migrations, since it does not require an initial outage on the source system, and it also eliminates any database locks or conflicts that might arise.

IBM announced Partition Mirroring back in July 2025. But at that time, it only supported this feature on IBM i 7.4. With the Summer TRs, it is now supported on IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8.

Finally, MWA introduces new user experience enhancements that, IBM says, will allow the user to more easily plan and navigate through the migration phases. You can read more about the updates to MWA here.

BRMS Updates

IBM is also delivering new capabilities with its popular backup product, Backup, Recovery and Media Services for i (BRMS). Specifically, the updates are being made to the Web interface, BRMS GUI version 2026.2.0.

Users gain several new capabilities in the BRMS Web GUI, including the capability to filter the BRMS log by severe messages (such as those that are considered critical and capable of causing a control group to fail). Users can also filter by messages that contain “objects not saved” text, IBM says.

IBM has given users new views that allow them to see object-level and file-level details in the Backup History Management component. Users can also restore from an object level when object detail is included in the save, and they can also restore link data if object details was saved.

IBM has improved its backup list management capabilities by giving users the ability to add, copy, and remove backup lists, as well as the ability to edit backup list entries. In the SQL view, IBM has added a documentation link.

On the administrative front, IBM added a new role-based usage type, *SYSOPR, which allows read/view access to media and backup information; allows capability to perform backup and restore operations; and restricts change, copy, and remove actions, unless the user owns the BRMS item.

IBM will ship these BRMS updates for IBM i 7.4 with PTF number SJ09069, for IBM i 7.5 with SJ09070, and for IBM i 7.6 with SJ09071.

IBM TS 7785 Virtual Tape Library

IBM i now supports the TS7785 VTL.

IBM is also bringing a new VTL to the IBM i family, the IBM TS7785. Powered by a Power9 processor, the TS7785 offers 1.57 PB of raw capacity per VTL, can store up to 11.77 petabytes of compressed data. It emulates a physical LTO 5 drive-based TS4500 and can backup data from a host server at speeds up to 4 gigabytes per second via up to eight, 32 Gb/sec Fibre Channel connectors.

With the Summer TRs, the TS7785 is now supporting IBM i. According to IBM, it’s integrated with IBM i BRMS and IBM Storage Protect, and works either through a native connection or through VIOS.

According to Whitney, IBM decided to bring its TS7700 VTLs from the System Z mainframe to its family of distributed systems, including IBM i and Linux. “This is the first time that IBM i is attaching to a TS7700 series tape drive,” he said during the Fortra webinar. “This is a tape drive that historically was heavily utilized in our mainframe, our System Z space.”

IBM i customers may not be used to the TS7785’s GRID architecture, which enables multiple VLTs to be linked together to increase storage capacity and resiliency.

“It is a grid architecture, so you can have multiple of these and they replicate and you can access your tapes from any parts of the grid,” Whitney said. “It’s slightly different than how virtual tape libraries work today in the industry.”

In addition to high speed backups and recoveries, the TS7785 supports in-line compression and encryption, offers geo dispersed replication, and helps users manage data through policy-based hierarchical storage capabilities.

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