The IT Jungle

After A Few Short Years, VS Code Passes Rational Developer for i

February 23, 2026 Alex Woodie

It has finally happened: Visual Studio Code has passed Rational Developer for i in usage, according to the 2026 version of Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Survey. The survey also shows lower adoption of greenscreen ADTS and increased use of DevOps tools, demonstrating some positive trends in IBM i application development.

It’s been barely two years since Fortra started asking IBM i customers about their use of Visual Studio Code, the free, Web-based integrated development environment (IDE) originally developed by Microsoft and set free as an open source project in November 2015. The 2024 survey (which was conducted in late 2023) …
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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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Guru: Managing The Lifecycle Of Your Service Programs – Updates Without Chaos

February 23, 2026 Gregory Simmons

You’ve written your service programs, organized your modules, picked your activation groups, and maybe even set up a tidy binding directory. Everything seems perfect – until someone needs to update a procedure that half the shop’s programs depend on. Suddenly, that tidy structure can feel like a trap. Welcome to the reality of service program lifecycle management.

The key principle here is simple: change with care. Any update to a service program can ripple across every program bound to it. Without a strategy, you’ll find yourself fielding calls about broken reports, failed jobs, or, worst of all, subtle logic errors …
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IT Spending Forecast Keeps Going Up And Up, But It Won’t Go Away

February 23, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Every time we turn around, the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and model builders slap down a couple 10 billion dollars in incremental spending on AI systems to fulfill their GenAI dreams, and all the market researchers have to pull out their models and have another whack at trying to case what will be spent in the coming years. This also gives them another chance to tweak their estimates for spending in the prior year, if it needs updating.

The forecasting wizards at Gartner have just released a revised spending breakdown for 2025 and – surprise, surprise! – an upwardly revised forecast …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 8

February 23, 2026 Doug Bidwell

This week, we start with three security vulnerabilities and a warning about media issues when you put your external LTO drives too close to the running Power Systems iron in your rack.

Let’s start with the vulnerabilities, as we often do.

First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM i is affected by denial of service vulnerabilities in Db2 JSON Store Technology Preview [CVE-2025-66453], which you can read more about here. The fixes for this vulnerability are as follows:
```
IBM i Release	PTF Number(s)
7.4	SJ08547
7.3	SJ08546
7.2	SJ08545
```
Second, we have IBM i Java Development Kit 8 64 & …
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It’s Time To Get An Offsite Data Protection Strategy

February 23, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We have nothing against tape cartridges, tape drives, and tape libraries large and small. There is absolutely nothing wrong with keeping tapes in an underground vault very far away from floods, winds, fire, and cosmic radiation. Which is why tape somewhere around 200 exabytes of LTO tape drive capacity was sold last year, and it is why tape drives and libraries comprise somewhere around 10 percent of the $50 billion to $60 billion of enterprise storage – meaning flash, disk, and tape media devices – sold each year.

Big Blue invented the IBM 726 tape drive in 1952, which was …
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Where We Are And Where We Are Headed With AI On IBM i

February 16, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Here we are in 2026, and we have gotten used to GenAI like we did the coronavirus pandemic after it largely ran its course after three years. The difference, of course, is that there is no vaccine for GenAI, especially when a substantial part of the growth in the global economy is coming from enormous capital spending on GenAI hardware and software.

I have spent a large portion of my career as an IT journalist and analyst tracking high end, large scale, distributed computing in its many forms and have been fascinated by the clever and creative advances in the …
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IBM Unveils Expert Query To Replace Db2 Web Query

February 16, 2026 Alex Woodie

IBM’s Technology Expert Labs is launching IBM Database Expert Query for i, a new tool that allows users to create and run reports against the integrated Db2 for i database from the comfort of a Web browser. IBM is positioning Expert Query as a replacement for Db2 Web Query, the business intelligence and analytics tool that it abruptly killed more than two years ago.

Expert Query was developed over the past year by Technology Expert Labs (formerly Lab Services). We have heard rumblings that Big Blue was gearing up a replacement for the well-liked Db2 Web Query product, and it …
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Guru: Are Binding Directories A Shortcut Or A Source Of Chaos?

February 16, 2026 Gregory Simmons

Ask any IBM i developer about binding directories, and you will usually get one of two reactions: A grateful nod or an eye roll. For some, binding directories are a lifesaver, making compile commands cleaner and projects easier to manage. For others, they are a ticking time bomb, introducing hidden dependencies that come back to haunt you months later.

I have seen both sides. In fact, one of the worst compile-day disasters I’ve witnessed started with a well-meaning developer adding a single service program to a global binding directory. Suddenly, half the shop’s programs were linking against the wrong version …
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IBM Takes On The Memory Crunch With New FlashSystem Lineup

February 16, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There is a shortage of main memory and flash in the world right now. This is due, in large part, to the explosion in investments in yottascale AI systems that burn tens of gigawatts of juice. Such systems require a huge amount of HBM stacked memory on their GPU and XPU accelerators as well as high performance DRAM and flash in their hosts and truly enormous shared flash storage to serve up datasets.

The biggest companies buy up most of the DRAM and flash chips a year or more before they are even made, but with demand skyrocketing, the memory …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 7

February 16, 2026 Doug Bidwell

First, we wish you all a happy belated Valentine’s Day, which we were thinking about because we put the IBM i PTF Guide together on Saturday.

Second, there is a new System Planning Tool, Version 6.26.041.0, which is available for download at this link. We also note that the link to the IBM Systems Workload Estimator and the link to the IBM Systems Energy Estimator no longer work and just take you to a generic IT Infrastructure page that is, how shall we say?, not particularly useful.

And third, we have Security Bulletin: IBM WebSphere Application Server could provide …
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IBM Starts Winding Down Power10 System Sales

February 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It may be hard to believe it, but the big, bad Power E1080, which is based on the Power10 processor, has been selling since September 2021. The remainder of the Power10 line, including entry and midrange machines, was announced in July 2022. And now, with the Power11 machines announced last July shipping in volume from top to bottom excepting the Power S1112 Mini, which should be coming out soon, and IBM doing build to order for all of its Power11 machines, it only stands to reason that Big Blue would stop selling Power10 iron as soon as …
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Guru: Service Programs And Activation Groups – Design Decisions That Matter

February 9, 2026 Gregory Simmons

If you have been writing service programs for a while, you might treat binding like flipping a light switch: write some code, compile it, bind it, done. It works – until it doesn’t. Behind the scenes, IBM i is doing a lot more than just connecting your program to a library of procedures. And if you’re not paying attention to activation groups and how you structure your service programs, you might be setting yourself up for sluggish performance or debugging nightmares down the road.

Let’s demystify what is really happening when you bind and why activation groups deserve more of …
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Strategic Topics To Think About For 2026, Part 1

February 9, 2026 Philippe Magne

Longevity is an amazing thing. ARCAD Software has now amassed more than 34 years of expertise centered around everything related to DevSecOps transformations. To start off the new year, I would like to share six strategic ideas that will help shape 2026 in the IBM i market, and beyond it.

The big new development for ARCAD is our fourth brand, called DISCOVER, which is focused on application intelligence. It’s the newest addition, and it’s very promising. We’re delighted to have convinced more than 25 customers by year 2025, and I think this will evolve significantly this year.

DISCOVER is all …
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Shield Gooses Performance Of Nagios Monitoring Tool, Adds AI Reporting

February 9, 2026 Alex Woodie

Large IBM i installations that experienced performance issues with older versions of Shield Advanced Solutions’ Nagios monitoring tool will be happy to hear that version 3.0 delivers a 2X to 3X performance boost. The new version, which Shield announced last month, also includes an early release of an integration with ChatGPT that automatically generates reports based on the real-time IBM i server metrics gathered by Nagios.

Nagios is a very popular open source IT infrastructure monitoring tool that’s been deployed millions of times around the world. It works by constantly pinging targets, which could be anything from server or storage …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 6

February 9, 2026 Doug Bidwell

Here is something handy if you are contemplating moving to IBM i 7.6: A comparison of IBM i 7.5 to IBM i 7.6, from IBM Support and available at this link. If you are moving from releases earlier than IBM i 7.5 to IBM i 7.6, then you should definitely take a gander at this as well. We have added a link in the Guide tab “Links” for this should you need to get to it later and to keep it top of mind.

Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last …
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Rolling The Die In 2026: IBM i Predictions, Take Two

February 2, 2026 Alex Woodie

A traditional Chinese curse states “May you live in interesting times.” That curse may apply to IBM i shops in 2026, which opens with equal parts uncertainty and anticipation. Artificial intelligence looms large, not only over information technology, but life as we know it. Add in the other variables impacting the midrange in the second year of the second quarter of the 21st century Anno Domini, and what you get is…well, interesting.

We start our second and final compilation of 2026 predictions with Bargav Balakrishnan, IBM’s vice president of product management for infrastructure. Balakrishnan took over the post …
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Perhaps 2026 Is The Year For Power Systems To Boom A Little

February 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In wrapping up IBM’s call with Wall Street analysts in the wake of Big Blue reporting its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2025 – which was a very good one for the most part, by the way – chief executive officer Arvind Krishna referred to the IBM Company as a “software-led, platform-centric company.”

This is no news to any of us who have been using or programming or analyzing the business of IBM over the many decades. Of course this is true. But for IBM, the main platform that is driving the big bucks at the top and …
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Guru: Binder Source Is Your Service Program’s Owner’s Manual

February 2, 2026 Gregory Simmons

If service programs are the backbone of modular RPG development, then binder source is the owner’s manual you didn’t know you needed. It’s not glamorous, but it’s the piece that ties everything together: Controlling what you export, defining your public API, and managing change over time. Yet, far too many shops treat binder source as optional – if they use it at all. That’s a mistake.

Let’s start with what binder source actually does. When you create a service program, you need to tell the system which procedures should be visible to callers. You could just use EXPORT(*ALL) and call …
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Skills Displaces Cybersecurity As Top Concern For IBM i Shops

February 2, 2026 Alex Woodie

Well, it was bound to happen eventually. After nine straight years as the top concern in the IBM i community, cybersecurity has finally fallen out of the number one position in Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Survey. Taking its place atop the closely watched survey is IBM i skills, an issue that has been lurking in the background but now must be considered a priority for IBM i leaders.

Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Survey provides a broad barometer on what’s going on with the IBM i community. One of the most closely watched questions in the survey, …
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