• Will Power Chips Get A Converged Arm Instruction Set Like Z Mainframe CPUs?

  August 31, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One a decade for the past six decades, Big Blue launches an effort to converge its diverse system architectures. It almost never works, with the exception of the launch of the System/360 mainframes in April 1964 and the AS/400 minicomputers in June 1988. And to be fair, the AS/400 was itself based in part on technologies created in a failed convergence effort.

  Back in 1986, the “Fort Knox” project sought to converge the System/4300 air-cooled, entry mainframe lines with the System/38 (from 1978) and the System/36 (from 1983), and it failed. But in the failure, the Rochester Labs took some …

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• Thinking About Moving IBM i To The Cloud? Don’t Start With The Quote

  August 31, 2026 Josh Patterson

  We get asked a deceptively simple question all the time: “What would it cost to move our IBM i environment to the cloud?”

  It sounds like a pricing question. Usually, it isn’t. Before we start talking about cores, memory, storage, or monthly costs, there’s a much more important question to answer: Why are you considering cloud in the first place?

  Maybe your Power server is approaching a refresh. Maybe your data center contract is ending. Maybe an experienced IBM i administrator is retiring. Maybe your disaster recovery strategy no longer meets the business’s needs. Or perhaps your organization has adopted …

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• Precisely To Add Ransomware Protection In MIMIX 11

  August 31, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Traditional high availability software that relies on real-time replication of journals is great at protecting against conventional threats, such as natural disasters or server failures. However, HA software is not so good at protecting against emerging threats, such as ransomware. That’s a weakness that Precisely is looking to address with the upcoming launch of MIMIX 11, which adds a new continuous data protection (CDP) capability.

  While the IBM i operating system is generally protected from malware designed for Windows and Linux-based systems, it’s not immune from all attacks, including ransomware attacks. If left exposed on the Internet, the Integrated File …

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• It’s D-Day For Cybersecurity, AI Firms Warn

  August 31, 2026 Alex Woodie

  The idea of sophisticated AI agents coordinating among themselves to launch a cyberattack on a major corporation sounds like something out of a science fiction novel. But it actually occurred earlier this year, and the agentic attacks will get more sophisticated soon if we don’t act swiftly to shore up defenses in legacy systems (like IBM i), a group of AI firms warned this month.

  In an open letter, the leaders of 100 AI companies, including IBM, Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI, warned that the recent episodes of AI agents going rogue and launching sophisticated attacks on …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 30

  August 31, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  After the deluge of the past two weeks with so many security vulnerabilities and patches for the IBM i platform, you are going to get an easier week now. This may or may not have to do with the vacation schedules of IBMers who try to kill bugs, or it may have to do with the impending Labor Day holiday in the United States.

  Who knows? Take the easy week while you have it. We are off next week for the holiday, and we will catch you up on the patches and vulnerabilities when we return on September 14.

  Here …

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• Oracle Dips A Toe Into IBM’s EBCDIC World

  August 24, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM’s Ted Codd may have invented the relational database back at the Almaden Lab in the early 1970s, but it was Larry Ellison’s Oracle that offered the world the first wildly commercially successful RDBMs. Technically, the System/38 was announced, with its integrated relational database, before the first version of Oracle was announced.

  Since then, Oracle and IBM have competed intensely to win and run transactional database workloads for some of the biggest enterprises around. But there was always one key difference between the two companies’ offerings: Oracle used an ASCI character set while the IBM midrange and mainframe systems relied …

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• When Your Small IBM i Team Is Really A Team Of One

  August 24, 2026 Ash Giddings

  IBM i has long been associated with efficiency. Its reliability, integrated architecture, and low administrative overhead have enabled organizations to run critical business applications with relatively small teams. That same efficiency has created an emerging risk: in many smaller shops, operational resilience depends less on the platform itself and more on whether enough people know how to support it under pressure.

  While some IBM i shops run with a lean team of two, three, or a small handful of staff, it is not unusual for one person to be responsible for the most critical aspects of the operation. The risk …

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• Guru: Putting Failure Handling In Its Place

  August 24, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  One of the things I enjoy most about procedure-driven RPG is that it encourages us to think about responsibility. Every procedure should have a clear purpose. It should perform one task well and leave unrelated concerns to other parts of the application.

  That sounds straightforward enough, yet one responsibility often finds its way into nearly every procedure we write: failure handling.

  If you have worked with RPG for any length of time, you have probably encountered applications where nearly every procedure begins with a MONITOR operation. The procedure performs its work, catches any exception that occurs, logs an error, returns …

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• Inside The Security Enhancements In ACS

  August 24, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Keeping track of IBM i configurations and how users are using IBM i is important for security purposes. But administrators and analysts are already so overburdened with other responsibilities that it is easy to let something slip by. That is why IBM is building new SQL capabilities into Access Client Solutions, which hopefully will make it easier for IBM i shops to spot potentially damaging configs or uses before they hurt the organization.

  ACS is one of the most important tools provided by IBM for IBM i professionals, as it contains a slew of facilities for interacting with the system. …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 29

  August 24, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  IBM laid a lot of PTF work on you last week, and this week is also a heavy one. So brace yourself. There are six security vulnerabilities in the IBM i stack and several other issues that you should be aware of. Let’s start with the random issues and then do the security issues.

  First, known issues (APARs) have been fixed for IBM i Access Client Solutions, ACS 1.1.9.15 (ACS11915), and here is the Klingon that describes it: DT498800 OSP-UNPRED MSGSSL007 – AN ERROR OCCURRED WITH AN SSL CERTIFICATE (JAVA.NIO.FILE.ATTRIBUTE.USERPRINCIPALNOTFOUNDEXCEPTION). I am not sure why they have to shout, but …

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