After installation of ferritic steel tiles, fast ion losses due to toroidal field ripple have been reduced by 1/2–1/3. The increase in absorbed power at same injection power can reduce the required number of neutral beam injector (NBI) units to sustain a given normalized beta, βN, resulting in a better flexibility of torque input by increasing the available combination of tangential NBI units. By making use of these advantages to sustain an internal transport barrier (ITB), the performance of long-pulse ELMy H-mode plasmas was improved in terms of sustained duration time for both high βN and high thermal confinement enhancement factor (HH98(y,2)). High βN > 2.3 together with HH98(y,2) ∼ 1 was sustained for 23.1 s (∼12τR, where τR is the current diffusion time) at q95 ∼ 3.3, which also provide high βNHH98(y,2) ≥ 2.2 and a bootstrap current fraction of ≥40%. βNHH98(y,2) of 2.0 was sustained for 28.6 s, which is limited by the maximum injection period of 30s for NBI system. These long-pulse plasmas are possible candidates for ITER hybrid operation scenario. Improved confinement is characterized by the larger thermal components at a given density maintained by lower heating power than in previous experiments. The strength of the ITB depends on the pedestal temperature, which varies with edge density while keeping constant the edge pressure (limited by type I ELMs). The fact that co-toroidal rotation as a result of reduced fast ion losses provides better quality of Te-ITB also contributes the improvement of thermal plasma confinement. These long-pulse plasmas indicate that further investigation to establish high performance plasmas longer than the time scale of wall saturation (τW) with active particle control is essential to establish the operational scenarios for next step devices, where the wall pumping does not work.