COMMON POWERUp 2026

PowerHA for IBM i continues to evolve, with new capabilities and enhancements delivered multiple times each year. In this session, we’ll explore the latest features and improvements that simplify high availability and disaster recovery management. Stay up to date, gain practical insight into deployment strategies, and ensure you’re getting the most from the latest PowerHA innovations.

Learning Objectives:

1. See what's new in PowerHA 2. Learn how to provide feedback to shape the roadmap

Are you managing an IBM i environment that hasn’t been updated in years, struggling to meet modern regulatory requirements, or facing disaster recovery (DR) challenges that put your business continuity at risk? In this fast-paced, practical session, we’ll walk through how a large regional retailer, processing $Ms in transactions per day, modernized IBM i DR after 20+ years of “don’t touch it” status—improving recovery, reducing operational drag, and closing compliance gaps.

Learning Objectives:

What you’ll learn from our client story: * From legacy to modern DR: How the client transformed an IBM i DR setup that was essentially untouched for over 20 years. * How Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) were significantly improved versus the prior approach. * How the client lowered its run-rate and cleaned up ops by streamlining and fencing in ongoing costs and day-to-day management effort. * What we implemented to minimize the impact of modern cyber threats. * How our client ensured faster, more reliable recovery for a high-volume environment by reducing its DR recovery debt

You have a disaster recovery plan? Are you really prepared? We are now in the Cloud ! How does this affect my DR Plan going forward ? The difference in surviving depends on how well you prepare for the unexpected. This session breaks down the components of disaster recovery planning as it relates to the availability and recovery of your systems. Testing is essential to examining critical points of failure, assumptions, and technical gaps.

Learning Objectives:

1. Evaluate the effectiveness of your current disaster recovery plan in hybrid and cloud environments. 2. Identify critical dependencies, assumptions, and failure points in IBM i DR testing. 3. Develop a repeatable annual DR validation process to ensure readiness and business continuity.

Db2 Mirror for IBMi enables continuous availability for your mission-critical applications. Learn how Db2 Mirror synchronously mirrors database updates between two separate nodes in an active-active or active-passive (with read access on the secondary) mode. Presenting 2 case studies deigned to deliver near zero downtime and optimal application availability to their business.

Learning Objectives:

Learning objectives: 1. IBM Lab DB2 Assessment 2. Building a proven reference architecture with Testing and Operations 3. Understand new features available for DB2 Mirror

In today’s ever-evolving IT landscape, ensuring continuous business operations requires a strategic approach to High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR). With a growing array of technologies, both on-premises and in the cloud, choosing the right solution can feel like navigating a maze. This session will guide you through the key considerations for building a resilient HA/DR strategy. We’ll explore the different types of outages and align them with the technologies designed to mitigate their impact. Whether you're planning for hardware failures, software issues, or full system outages, understanding your business requirements and protection goals is critical. Join us for a practical overview of HA/DR technologies including Db2 Mirror, Live Partition Mobility, Logical and Software-Based Replication, Full System Replication, and PowerHA. You’ll leave with a clearer roadmap to help you make informed decisions and confidently chart your HA/DR journey.

Learning Objectives:

1. Learn the importance of considering your recovery point objective and recovery time objective for different types of outages 2. Learn how different technologies can help achieve various RPO and RTO targets. 3. Learn how the technologies can be combined

Businesses today demand up-time, and reliability to move product and deliver services. Can your IBM i survive a sudden, unplanned event? Learn from multiple Data Center, Cloud, and regional disasters, to know if your DR Solution works in an actual Disaster. People, Technology and Geography are common critical points of failure. Let's keep our mistakes Original!

Learning Objectives:

1. Recognize common points of failure across people, technology, and geography during real disasters. 2. Learn how to design and execute a DR plan that performs under real-world conditions. 3. Build organizational resilience through effective planning, communication, and testing.

Learn to think like a spy! Many shops use journaling for a variety of reasons, but may not be familiar with how to use these journals for forensic purposes. Mining your journals for the who, what, when, where, how - and sometimes even why - can be very useful, not to mention fun! Come join us for a lighthearted and entertaining "Mission: Impossible" themed look at one of the most useful things you can do with your journals. This session will introduce journaling concepts and share tuning tips to optimize your journal environment for forensics. After reviewing the "old fashioned" way to dig into your journals, we will demonstrate how much easier this is with the right tools. The DMPJRN and CVTJRNDTA commands used in this presentation will be made available as a free download to all attendees, including source code!

Learning Objectives:

Learning Objectives - After participating in this session, attendees should have the skills and tools to: - Optimize your journal environment to maximize the forensic information available to you - Understand what your journals are trying to tell you, and how to interrogate them to get the answers you need - Dump your journals quickly and easily using the free software made available - Be able to interpret the content of your journals to determine what really happened to your data - Use the techniques demonstrated in the provided source code to develop your own tools - Save the world from evil-doers

There are MANY things that you did NOT plan for that would cause you to need an HA, or at LEAST a DR system. Virtually every one of these are items from my personal customers, not made up or 'read it on the internet!' You will be surprised and potentially even shocked by some of these occurrences.. Despite your security policies, the quality of your building, reliability of power and cooling, you cannot think of everything.

Learning Objectives:

You will realize that you cannot prevent every disaster, so you MUST have (at least!) a "Plan B!"

Join us for a hands-on, interactive session that walks through the end-to-end deployment and management of PowerHA on IBM i using Independent Auxiliary Storage Pools (IASPs). We’ll begin by creating an IASP and demonstrate how to migrate applications and data into it effectively. From there, we’ll explore how to build a highly available solution using either IBM Power Virtual Server with Global Replication Services or IBM FlashSystem’s Asynchronous Policy-Based Replication. This session will also cover key concepts and best practices for managing PowerHA environments across internal, external, and cloud storage infrastructures. To bring it all together, we’ll perform a live role swap to showcase real-time failover capabilities.

Learning Objectives:

1. Understand how to deploy PowerHA 2. Gain practical insights into migrating applications and data to an Independent Auxiliary Storage Pool (IASP). 3. Learn techniques for synchronizing security and configuration objects across HA environments. 4. Observe a live role swap and learn how to manage failover scenarios in real-time.