TFH Volume: 36 Issue: 9 Archives

No Joke: Big Memory And Flash Price Hikes Coming April 1

March 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As I told you about last week, price increases for Power Systems and Storage products have indeed come to pass. We were poo-pooing the idea that IBM would have a 25 percent across-the-board price increase, saying this would be unprecedented and unjustified. But the price increases that go into effect in three weeks (just after the first financial quarter of 2026 ends) are jaw dropping even if they are mainly for main memory and flash drives.

We would love to show you the link to the announcement letter, but as far as we know there is no customer announcement …
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Strategic Topics To Think About For 2026, Part 2

March 9, 2026 Philippe Magne

Last month, in the first part of this series, I presented a bunch of strategic topics that I think the IBM i community needs to think about as we figure out what needs to be done in their application estates in 2026 and beyond. I talked predominantly about pragmatism versus hype with AI and then DevSecOps transformation and AI integration into DevSecOps. You can read Part 1 at this link, and that is probably a good idea before diving into Part 2.

In Part 2, I want to focus in on application security. This is a big theme, and …
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Guru: IBM i Job Log Detective Brings Structure To Job Log Analysis In VS Code

March 9, 2026 Gregory Simmons

Remain Software has released a new Visual Studio Code extension called IBM i Job Log Detective, and it targets a pain point every IBM i developer understands: reading job logs efficiently.

In addition to its marketplace availability, IBM i Job Log Detective is open source under the MIT license and can be found on GitHub at: https://github.com/RemainSoftware/jld

There has never been anything wrong with IBM i job logs themselves. They are exhaustive, consistent, and remarkably detailed. When something fails, the job log contains the truth. The issue has always been consumption. Large QPJOBLOG files can run thousands of lines (or …
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IBM Launches Hybrid Cloud Backup Product With Cobalt Iron

March 9, 2026 Alex Woodie

IBM and its business partner Cobalt Iron last week announced the launch of a new cloud backup product. Dubbed Secure Automated Backup with Compass for IBM Cloud, the new SaaS offering can protect data residing across customers’ landscape, including IBM Cloud, other clouds, and on-prem systems like IBM i.

Cobalt Iron was founded in 2013 with the goal of modernizing backup and recovery. Founder Richard Spurlock saw that companies were spending too much time with platform-specific backup products, so he decided to build a centralized virtual tape library (VTL) solution that could back up and recover data across a range …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 10

March 9, 2026 Doug Bidwell

It was a super quiet week in IBM i Land this week. Seriously. Like, we have never seen it so quiet. No security vulnerabilities, no new PTF groups issued for any of the five supported IBM i releases. It has been very, very quiet indeed. So that probably means you need to brace yourself for a bunch of stuff in the next couple of weeks.

We did want to point out that there are massive price changes coming for Power Systems main memory, which were announced to business partners on March 2 and which take effect on April. (This is …
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Why You Need To Think About Offsite Data Protection

March 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Many of you do tape backups as part of your disaster recovery plan, and some of you only have tape backups as your only disaster recovery plan. Tape drives have their place, just like disk arrays do. But in the 21^st century, two decades after cloud compute and storage went mainstream, it really is time for you to get an offsite data protection plan together that is a little faster and more interactive than recovery from tape backups.

Tape is fine, but it simply is not enough. In a modern world where people or increasingly AI agents can hack …
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No Joke: Big Memory And Flash Price Hikes Coming April 1

Strategic Topics To Think About For 2026, Part 2

Guru: IBM i Job Log Detective Brings Structure To Job Log Analysis In VS Code

IBM Launches Hybrid Cloud Backup Product With Cobalt Iron

IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 10

Why You Need To Think About Offsite Data Protection

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