• 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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• 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 …

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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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• 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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• IBM Streamlines Data Migration With New Partition Mirror Tech

  July 28, 2025 Alex Woodie

  There is a brand new technology available for migrating data from one IBM i partition to another as part of IBM’s new Migrate While Active tool. It’s called partition mirror, and it gives IBM i shops a potentially less disruptive method for moving data across distances both long and short.

  IBM first unveiled its new Migrate While Active product in October 2024 as part of its announcement introducing subscriptions for the PowerHA high availability and Db2 Mirror continuous availability products. The co-mingling of the announcements made some sense when you consider that the original Migrate While Active product utilized a …

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• With Subscription Price, IBM i P20 And P30 Tiers Get Bigger Bundles

  July 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has been noodling how it might tweak the subscription pricing for the P20 and P30 tiers since getting feedback on the first pass it did on its big iron Power Systems machines way back in February 2023. That feedback from the company’s biggest IBM i customers was not entirely glowing, but IBM has been clear that it would in the fullness of time move from perpetual software licensing to subscription pricing on all of its software, and that IBM i would not be an exception.

  To cushion the blow – and there is one because customers keep machines …

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• What’s New With IBM PowerVS In 2025?

  April 2, 2025 Alex Woodie

  It has been six years since IBM launched IBM Power Virtual Server, its public cloud offering for IBM i workloads. Adoption started slowly but has picked up in recent years as IBM fleshed out the offering and expanded it to more datacenters. As we enter the second quarter, IBM is banking on several new features to help it attract more IBM i customers to PowerVS.

  Last October, IBM offered PowerVS in 21 IBM Cloud datacenters around the world, including 650 Power Systems customers. Doris Conti, the vice president of Power Systems product management, told The Four Hundred that IBM had …

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• Shield Adds Task Automation To Message Monitoring Tool

  March 17, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Automating the monitoring of IBM i messages was just the start for Shield Advanced Solutions and its AAG offering. This month, the company announced that the Nagios-based tool has been bolstered with support for Ansible, which gives it the capability to automatically respond and take actions based on certain IBM i messages.

  Shield Advanced Solutions launched AAG, which stands for At-A-Glance, back in 2023 as a way to help its customers monitor high availably setups. Shield President Chris Hird was aghast that some IBM i shops were leaving mirrored pairs under monitored, which reduced the odds the systems would be …

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• Steve Will Lifts the Curtain On “Major IBM i Announcement,” But Just A Smidge

  March 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

  If you haven’t heard yet, here it is: IBM is planning to make a major IBM i announcement soon. IBM i chief architect Steve Will said as much during his recent IBM i Guided Tour. While Will shared a general outline of what IBM has in mind for the major announcement, specifics still are few and far between.

  Will, who also holds the titles of IBM i CTO and IBM distinguished engineer, teased the IBM i community with his one-hour February 12 presentation, which is titled IBM i in 2025 – A Strategic Preview. You can access a recording …

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