The IT Jungle

No Joke: Big Memory And Flash Price Hikes Coming April 1

March 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As I told you about last week, price increases for Power Systems and Storage products have indeed come to pass. We were poo-pooing the idea that IBM would have a 25 percent across-the-board price increase, saying this would be unprecedented and unjustified. But the price increases that go into effect in three weeks (just after the first financial quarter of 2026 ends) are jaw dropping even if they are mainly for main memory and flash drives.

We would love to show you the link to the announcement letter, but as far as we know there is no customer announcement …
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Strategic Topics To Think About For 2026, Part 2

March 9, 2026 Philippe Magne

Last month, in the first part of this series, I presented a bunch of strategic topics that I think the IBM i community needs to think about as we figure out what needs to be done in their application estates in 2026 and beyond. I talked predominantly about pragmatism versus hype with AI and then DevSecOps transformation and AI integration into DevSecOps. You can read Part 1 at this link, and that is probably a good idea before diving into Part 2.

In Part 2, I want to focus in on application security. This is a big theme, and …
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Guru: IBM i Job Log Detective Brings Structure To Job Log Analysis In VS Code

March 9, 2026 Gregory Simmons

Remain Software has released a new Visual Studio Code extension called IBM i Job Log Detective, and it targets a pain point every IBM i developer understands: reading job logs efficiently.

In addition to its marketplace availability, IBM i Job Log Detective is open source under the MIT license and can be found on GitHub at: https://github.com/RemainSoftware/jld

There has never been anything wrong with IBM i job logs themselves. They are exhaustive, consistent, and remarkably detailed. When something fails, the job log contains the truth. The issue has always been consumption. Large QPJOBLOG files can run thousands of lines (or …
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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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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 10

March 9, 2026 Doug Bidwell

It was a super quiet week in IBM i Land this week. Seriously. Like, we have never seen it so quiet. No security vulnerabilities, no new PTF groups issued for any of the five supported IBM i releases. It has been very, very quiet indeed. So that probably means you need to brace yourself for a bunch of stuff in the next couple of weeks.

We did want to point out that there are massive price changes coming for Power Systems main memory, which were announced to business partners on March 2 and which take effect on April. (This is …
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Why You Need To Think About Offsite Data Protection

March 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Many of you do tape backups as part of your disaster recovery plan, and some of you only have tape backups as your only disaster recovery plan. Tape drives have their place, just like disk arrays do. But in the 21^st century, two decades after cloud compute and storage went mainstream, it really is time for you to get an offsite data protection plan together that is a little faster and more interactive than recovery from tape backups.

Tape is fine, but it simply is not enough. In a modern world where people or increasingly AI agents can hack …
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IBM Gets Bob 1.0 Off The Ground

March 2, 2026 Alex Woodie

IBM this month finally will get a coding co-pilot into the hands of its IBM i installed base with the launch of Bob. The general availability of Bob 1.0.0 on March 24 will mark the end of the long wait for IBM i customers – and in particular, the large population of RPG developers – to start using IBM-branded AI software to maintain and develop IBM i software.

The world of generative AI moves quickly, as the large language models (LLMs) from frontier providers improve on a weekly, if not daily, basis. This is both exciting, as the capabilities of …
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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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More Power Systems Withdrawals, And Some From Red Hat, Too

March 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is a quiet time in IBM i Land right now as we await the P05-class Power Systems 1112 “Mini” system announcement, which we are guessing will happen sometime between March and the POWERUp 2026 conference, which will be hosted in New Orleans between April 27 and 30. There are some sundry things that you should be aware of, just the same.

In announcement letter AD26-0071, dated February 24, IBM is tearing a whole bunch of features and cables from the Power Systems lineup, effective immediately. A cursor look shows that a lot of these are pretty old features …
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Price Increases Are Here, Or Pending, And For Sure For Memory

March 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The rumor mill was buzzing last week about price increases at IBM and in its Power Systems business in particular. We have no idea what is real or not, but we thought it was our responsibility to let you know what is going on in the infrastructure market and why prices increases are inevitable – if they have not already taken place.

What we can tell you is that we watch IBM’s announcements like a hawk and we have not seen any price increases thus far this year. But given the state of the flash and main memory markets, we …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 9

March 2, 2026 Doug Bidwell

Welcome to March. You have five security vulnerabilities to take care of. The good news is that there is not a lot of other PTF stuff you have to worry about if you are on IBM i 7.3 through IBM i 7.6. There are Group HIPER and Group Security updates for IBM i 7.2, which is still under extended support.

Let’s go through the security vulnerabilities to start, as we usually do.

First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM Rational Developer for i is affected by a memory exhaustion loop (CVE-2024-4068), which you can read about here. (And for …
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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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