• 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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• When IBM i Skills Become A Resilience Risk

  May 11, 2026 Ash Giddings

  For many IBM i organizations, availability planning has traditionally focused on technology failure. Hardware faults, storage issues, site outages, and more recently cyber incidents, have shaped how high availability and disaster recovery strategies are designed.

  What is less frequently acknowledged is that people have become one of the most significant availability risks in modern IBM i environments.

  Skills shortages, retirement trends, and reliance on a small number of highly experienced individuals are changing the risk profile of the platform. In many cases, the greatest threat to continuity is no longer whether systems can fail over, but whether the right people …

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• Why Logical Replication Has Become The New Standard for IBM i HA/DR

  February 23, 2026 Ash Giddings

  In IBM i environments, data is not simply something applications use. For many organizations, particularly in manufacturing, finance, distribution, retail, and government, the data is the business. Orders, invoices, inventory positions, compliance records, and customer histories exist nowhere else. If that data is unavailable, inconsistent, or unrecoverable, the business does not just suffer a slowdown. It stops.

  This reality has always been understood within the IBM i community. What has changed is the level of assurance now expected around data protection, recoverability, and governance. High availability and disaster recovery are no longer judged by whether data is replicated, but by …

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• Shaking The IBM i Magic Eight Ball For 2026

  January 26, 2026 Alex Woodie

  After one more trip around the Sun, the IBM i community is back at it for another turn. What will become of our favorite box in 2026, let alone the people who work on it? That is not easy to say. As the great ballplayer/philosopher Yogi Berra once said: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” But we try anyway.

  We kick off 2026 IBM i predictions with some targeted insight from Bill Langston, director of marketing, New Generation Software:

  “I feel like 2026 will be a quiet year with the most adventurous IBM i customers …

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• A Hardware Refresh Is The Perfect Time To Re-Evaluate Your HA/DR Strategy

  November 10, 2025 Ash Giddings

  For most IBM i shops, hardware refresh cycles arrive with a mix of excitement and apprehension. New generations of IBM Power Systems like the recently announced Power11 machines offer the chance to increase power, improve efficiency, and take advantage of the latest features.

  But along with the upside, upgrades also trigger some tough decisions, particularly around software licensing. High availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) solutions are often near the top of that list. These tools are critical for helping businesses to maintain resilience and continuity, yet many customers find themselves paying significantly more for their HA/DR software after a hardware …

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• NAViGATE, inPower 2025 On Tap for September 2025

  September 15, 2025 Alex Woodie

  As the summer turns to fall, IBM i professionals will be turning out to a pair of events being hosted in the Midwest, including Infor’s imPower 2025 conference in Wisconsin, and COMMON’s NAViGATE conference taking place in Pennsylvania. Both shows are expected to draw hundreds of participants.

  NAViGATE 2025 takes place this week in Pittsburgh. COMMON is hosting about 110 sessions on IBM i topics across the three-day event, including sessions on application development, security, high availability, and administering the system.

  Tim Rowe, an IBM architect for application development, and Julia Yan, the lead developer of Navigator for i, will …

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• Is Your IBM i HA/DR Actually Tested – Or Just Installed?

  August 25, 2025 Ash Giddings

  When it comes to high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) on IBM i, one question instantly separates the prepared from the at-risk: When was the last time you tested a full role swap?

  It’s surprising how often IT managers and system administrators mention that HA/DR measures are in place, yet then admit that their solutions haven’t been tested in months, sometimes even years. In some cases, the DR systems were implemented but never validated at all.

  According to Gartner, despite the mission-critical nature of disaster recovery, fewer than half of businesses have tested their DR plans within the past …

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• Maxava Consulting Services Does More Than HA/DR Project Management – A Lot More

  May 12, 2025 Yvonne Enselman

  IT organizations have been having to do more with less for so long that it is frankly amazing that anything at all gets done some decades later. And the funny thing is that the To Do list just keeps getting longer – and wider – as the years go by.

  We know exactly how short-staffed and over-burdened IBM i shops are, and that is why Maxava is launching Maxava Consulting Services, a new arm of the high availability software maker that aims to provide a broad and deep set of strategic and tactical services to help IBM i shops get …

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• Coming To You Live In A Datacenter Very Near You, Or One Far Away, Too

  February 24, 2025 Ash Giddings

  We are at a pivotal moment in IBM i history regarding migration options. Public cloud solutions like IBM Power Virtual Server and Skytap on Azure have matured to the point where they are now viable for production workloads, shedding the novelty value that surrounded them during the era which coincided with the launch of IBM’s Power9 machines, to a lesser extent, Power10 iron.

  Additionally, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) worldwide are well equipped with Power10 hardware and the expertise to support both migrations and ongoing operations. Furthermore, on-premise Power10 delivers impressive price-to-performance benefits, with Power11 poised to raise the bar even …

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• 2025 IBM i Predictions, Part Two

  January 20, 2025 Alex Woodie

  With new wall calendars and a new (old) guy in the White House, change is in the air as we start off 2025. That much was obvious from the first installment of IBM i predictions, which ran last week. This second batch of predictions may be even bolder than the first.

  We’re in the midst of a shakeup in the tech job market, thanks to several years of elevated inflation, emergence of cloud computing, and new technologies like AI. How does that impact the IBM i job market? For insight, we turn to Bob Langieri, the owner of Excel Technical …

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