COMMON POWERUp 2026

The IBM i development team has just delivered a brand new release - IBM i 7.6 along with several Technology Refreshes. These deliveries are just full of new enhancements targeted to help your business applications run more securely. In this session, Scott and Tim will detail a number of the new enhancements, helping you understand what's new and be ready to target the sessions throughout the conference that provide a deeper dive. Many of you wait to upgrade, we are going to show you why IBM i 7.6 may be the release to break that trend!!! Attend this session to see the must-have technologies for your IBM i.

Learning Objectives:

Learn about 7.6 and the features deliver in the Technology Refreshes

Db2 for i provides useful tools and examples in the SYSTOOLS schema. Come to this session to learn what shiny gems lie within this unopened treasure chest. You need not be an SQL programmer to gain tremendous value from SQL tools! https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.6?topic=optimization-systools

Learning Objectives:

1) Understand what SYSTOOLS-based tools exist 2) Learn the basics of how to use these tools 3) Hear what others are already doing with these amazing tools 4) Interact with the IBM architect responsible for SYSTOOLS

Every few months the IBM i development team delivers new updates and features across the operating system. Keeping track and actually using these changes can be a difficult task at best. This session is the favorite new enhancements from a team of IBM i developers. You get to hear each of our favorite updates to the OS that have been delivered over the past bit. This session is new every time, often lots of fun and for sure there is something for everyone.

Learning Objectives:

Learn about the many new features of IBM i

In days gone by the IBM supplied program QSTRUP combined with a couple options on CHGIPLA was good enough for most IBM i shops. It started what seemed to be needed and anything else we stumbled through after each IPL. When it was time to shut down a PWRDWNSYS or ENDSBS command took down whatever was running. We were happy. Today though we often see dozens of subsytems running many web servers, other needed batch jobs and services. We see monitors and queue processing jobs and many writers. For security purposes we should be starting only the TCP servers that we need, not all of them. Likely we should not start IPV6 and start things in sequence as well. Further considerations may be needed in an HA environment. These include not starting jobs until iASPS are available and starting different IP interfaces and services depending on production or backup mode of the server. We may want to handle special startup modes while doing PTFs, backups or other system maintenance. In this session we will work with customizing that startup. We'll discuss staring PASE jobs with QSH, web server jobs and more. Finally we will also work with sequencing the shutdown of the system. As part of this we'll discuss some simple ways to know what needs to be shut down and smoothly handling that.

Learning Objectives:

1. Learn how to control which startup program will run on your IBM i. 2. Examine the various servers to start and how to control them. 3. Learn options for starting different services. 4. Consider ways to control the startup of your server in different operating modes. 5. Understanding an orderly shutdown of your IBM i server.

Learn about the latest updates and tools to manage your IBM i. IBM Navigator for i is the strategic tool for managing the IBM i operating system. In this session we will demo using some great Navigator wizards, how to configure TLS for the many servers on the IBM i. Learn how to deal with user profiles across multiple systems, we will even do a quick demo on how to configure MFA. Plus your questions.

Learning Objectives:

Learn best practices for managing and securing the IBM i

iSee is all about helping our IBM i user community learn and use SQL to solve everyday life problems. This session is no exception, Scott and Tim will show via live demo some fun new way to solve problems with SQL. This iSee session will explore some of the brand new features recently delivered via 7.6 and the past Technology Refreshes.

Learning Objectives:

Learn how to put SQL to use in solving every day problems.

This session describes how to design and configure a 'Clean Room' Lpar for an IBM Power systems environment. This introduces users to the theory and considerations required to implement an 'IBM Power Cyber Vault' solution. It empowers users with the knowledge of the IBM FlashSystem storage and IBM Power operational resilience features that can be used to create a safe place to validate and recover safeguarded copy backups and prepare for recovery in case of a Cyber event or data corruption. I will explain the Power VM technology that makes a 'Clean Room' Lpar easy and lightweight to create and manage whilst still ensuring a logical air-gap from production data. I will also encourage a discussion around the benefits of planning Cyber resilience and recovery procedures and provide a high level of the IBM and ISV 'Power Cyber Vault' offerings.

Learning Objectives:

How to use Power VM virtualization techniques to create a 'Clean Room' Lpar. How to plan for and configure IBM Safeguarded Copy for IBM Flash System and DS storage. How to take an immutable backup and validate or recovery data into the Clean Room Lpar.