• 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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• You Store The Crown Jewels In A Safe, Not In A Bucket

  March 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  All petabytes are not equal. A petabyte of unstructured data that may have a few nuggets of informational gold veins running through it, for instance, is definitely a lot more valuable than a petabyte of cat videos. But it is not anywhere nearly as valuable as the database and application code backups of thousands of customers running IBM i systems.

  And that, in a nutshell, is why Fresche Solutions, which is perhaps best known as a provider of application and database modernization tools in the IBM i market, but which is also a cloud in its own right as well …

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• IBM Power Offsite Data Protection That Fits The Way IBM i Shops Already Work

  January 26, 2026 Don Gentile Steven Dickens

  For decades, IBM Power systems have supported some of the most critical systems of record in the global economy. Banking, insurance, healthcare, retail, and government organizations all rely on IBM i environments for stability, data integrity, and predictable operations. These are not necessarily the world’s flashiest workloads, but they are essential for keeping the lights on, transactions flowing, and making sure the trains run on time.

  Yet even in these well-managed environments, Offsite data protection remains a persistent challenge. Local backup and availability are rarely the issue. Most IBM Power shops have mature backup routines and, in many cases, high-availability …

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• FalconStor Doubles Down On IBM Power With Habanero Offsite Data Protection

  January 19, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the secrets to the success and longevity of the OS/400 and IBM i platform is integration for the sake of simplicity. That may be two closely interrelated secrets, now that we think about it, but the important thing is that for any product or service to take off among the IBM i faithful, it has to integrate well with the platform and it has to mask complexity even when an underlying technology might be quite hairy.

  With the rise of many clouds and hosters based on Power Systems machinery and the desire to get offsite data protection to …

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• What You Will Find In IBM i 7.6 TR1 and IBM i 7.5 TR7

  October 13, 2025 Alex Woodie

  It’s early October, which means leaves are changing colors, nights are getting colder, and IBM developers in southern Minnesota and elsewhere are gearing up the autumnal Technology Refreshes for the IBM i operating system.

  With last week’s announcements of TR1 for IBM i 7.6 and TR7 for IBM i 7.5, which ship November 21, IBM has committed to delivering a slew of updates and new functionality across the range of IBM i system software, from application development to administration.

  Before we get into the specific areas of IBM i, let’s cover the general enhancements it made with I/O handling. For …

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• LaserVault Adds Multi-Path Support To ViTL

  September 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  LaserVault is shipping a new release of its virtual tape library software that is likely to find a warm reception among customers who need different retention periods for their IBM i backups. By enabling ViTL 4.0 to support multiple storage paths to backend storage appliances, it’s allowing customers to reduce the amount of data they store and giving them an overall more efficient backup environment.

  ViTL is the name of LaserVault’s flagship virtual tape library (VLT) for IBM i, which the company (also known as known as Electronic Storage Corp) launched back in 2018. The product, which emulates …

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• You Can Now Get IBM Tech Support For VS Code For i

  August 11, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that were on the fence about migrating from Rational Developer for i and adopting VS Code for RPG and COBOL development just received one big reason why they should bite the bullet and make the move: the launch of a new technical support package for Code for i from IBM.

  Visual Studio Code is currently the most popular integrated development environment (IDE) on planet Earth, according to multiple measures, such as the Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey, which found Microsoft VS Code was used by 76 percent of all respondents, more than twice the usage of …

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• BRMS Isn’t The Only Backup Product With A Security Problem

  July 21, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM last month patched a serious security flaw in BRMS, the built-in backup and recovery facility that it ships with the IBM i operating system. The flaw is the latest in a series of security flaws uncovered in backup tools, which cyber criminals appear to be now targeting.

  If you’re a regular reader of Doug Bidwell’s IBM i PTF Guide – and really, if you are responsible for managing an IBM i environment, you should be reading it regularly – then you already knew about the security flaw in BRMS. Bidwell covered the flaw and the associated emergency PTF for …

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• Tandberg Bankruptcy Leaves A Hole In IBM Power Storage

  June 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A problem has been brewing for back and archiving needs for entry and some midrange IBM i shops, and we did not know about it until the spit hit the fan last week. Had we known earlier, we could have warned you. And maybe Big Blue could have and should have warned you directly more immediately a few months ago instead of in the announcement that came out last week and that did not actually explain what was going on even a little bit.

  In announcement letter AD25-0836, dated May 27, IBM said that effective that day it was …

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• IBM Hikes Hardware, Software, And Services Prices

  November 4, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Inflation might be somewhat tamed in the major economies of the world, but the price increases keep coming from Big Blue as it tries to balance out its costs and its need to profit to drive the stock that provides the real compensation for top executives against customers who are getting pretty sick of price increases in every aspect of their business and personal lives.

  We saw a price increase hit our emails, as did other IBM i shops, on October 29 last week, but if you look at announcement letter AD24-2249, it was dated September 3, 2024. Go …

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