Storagepipe Offers Online Backups for i OS, Too

Published: November 17, 2009

by Alex Woodie

i OS shops that are in the market for an online backup and recovery solution for their System i servers have a number of options available to them, which have been covered in considerable depth in Four Hundred Stuff. And now there is one more vendor to add to the list: Storagepipe Solutions, a Toronto, Ontario, company that actually was a pioneer in the field of online backup and recovery for AS/400s way back in 2003.

Storagepipe bills itself as the first Canadian storage service provider (SSP) to use a pure IBM server architecture. The company's backup and storage system is based on Tivoli Storage Manager (we won't hold that against them), which it notes is used by 80 percent of the Fortune 100 (if hardly any real midrange AS/400 shops).

There has been a considerable amount of attention lately given to new backup and recovery techniques, including D2D, VTL, CDP, and data de-duplication devices that can suck data out of servers at tremendous speeds, compress it, encrypt it, and send it over the network to a duplicate device, or upload it to a vendor's facility that lives in the "cloud" on the other side of the Internet.

As it turns out, Storagepipe beat many storage vendors to the cloud when it launched its pioneering online backup service in 2001. And was probably way ahead of any other i OS software vendors when it launched support for remote backups of the AS/400 two years later.

At the time, Storagepipe worked with a company called Application Solutions Inc. (ASI) to develop the offering; ASI was acquired in 2005 by Tecsys, a Montreal-based developer of supply chain software for the System i server.

Soon after the announcement, Storagepipe attracted several AS/400 clients, including adidas-Solomon Canada, a large manufacturer that has been noted for its lean operations and reliance on the AS/400.

With the Storagepipe solution, adidas-Solomon's daily backups were executed automatically, and the data was encrypted as it was sent over the Internet to Storagepipe's servers. "It works," said Paul Leone, adidas-Solomon's vice president of IT and logistics, in a case study from 2003. The city of Vaughan, Ontario, is another AS/400 shop that adopted Storagepipe's solution that year.

In addition to online backup and recovery, Storagepipe offers business continuity services, server replication and failover services, and data and e-mail archiving. The company shares room in an advanced co-location facility in Toronto with the latest in security and redundancy.

Last month, the company announced support for Windows 7 with its online backup service. It also supports Linux, Unix, Macintosh, NetWare, and a host of enterprise applications and databases. For more information, see the company's Web site at www.storagepipe.com.

RELATED STORIES

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