IBM Bolsters IBM i Resilience with Summer Tech Refresh Updates
IBM has bolstered the resilience of its IBM i platform through recent technology refreshes. The updates, which include enhancements to Migrate While Active and Backup, Recovery and Media Services for i (BRMS), aim to minimize downtime and improve disaster recovery capabilities.
Migrate While Active now allows users to perform an operating system upgrade as part of the migration process, reducing downtime even when moving to a new box or cloud environment. The technology also introduces additional methods for creating the target system copy, including external storage-based replication technologies such as FlashCopy and Global Copy.
Partition mirroring, which was introduced last year but only supported on IBM i 7.4, is now supported on IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8. This asynchronous storage replication technology eliminates the need for an initial outage on the source system and database locks or conflicts.
BRMS updates include improvements to the Web interface, BRMS GUI version 2026.2.0, with new capabilities such as filtering by severe messages and object-level details in the Backup History Management component.
The TS7785 Virtual Tape Library is now supported on IBM i, offering high-speed backups and recoveries, in-line compression and encryption, geo-dispersed replication, and policy-based hierarchical storage capabilities. This marks the first time that IBM i has attached to a TS7700 series tape drive, which was previously used primarily in System Z mainframes.
According to Kris Whitney, new IBM i chief architect, 'This is the first time that IBM i is attaching to a TS7700 series tape drive. This is a tape drive that historically was heavily utilized in our mainframe, our System Z space.'