• Welcoming The New IBM i Chief Architect And Other New Top Brass

  August 3, 2026 Alex Woodie

  As you have likely already heard, IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will retired last week after a 41-year IBM career, and was succeeded in that role by Kris Whitney, who previously was the IBM i platform’s chief engineer. But this is just one change among several in IBM i leadership in recent months.

  For the past four years, Will officially had three roles at IBM, including chief architect for IBM i, IBM i chief technology officer, and IBM Distinguished Engineer. The last two titles, which Will gained in 2022, were significant at the time as they denoted Will’s position …

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• 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 …

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• Updates Announced for IBM i BRMS And SMTP Email Client

  April 20, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue hasn’t yet announced its spring IBM i Technology Refresh (TR), which we told you last week will come a bit later this year to align with IBM’s expected announcement of a new entry-level, P05-class Power11 machine. But that didn’t stop IBM from making other IBM i-related announcements last week, including some important updates to BRMS and the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) email client.

  With its update for Backup, Recovery, and Media Services for i (BRMS), which IBM announced on April 14, IBM is bolstering the new Web GUI with updated capabilities that will make the product …

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• Spring IBM i Tech Refreshes Will Come A Bit Later This Year

  April 13, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM is working on a new Technology Refresh, as it traditionally does this time of year. But the spring TR announcement will not be made before the POWERUp conference takes place at the end of the month, IT Jungle has learned. Instead, the company will be holding off on the spring TR so that it aligns with a broader Power announcement.

  IBM i shops have been conditioned to expect two TRs every year, one in the spring (usually April) and another in the fall (usually October). The spring TR is usually timed to occur before COMMON holds its annual POWERUp …

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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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• 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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