Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

21st Century Software recently announced the reintroduction of an OS/400-based disaster recovery tool that's designed to speed backups and get a company's most vital applications up and running quickly after an outage. VFI/400, which is functionally equivalent to the company's flagship mainframe disaster recovery tool, DR/VFI, had entered beta tests but never became generally available. 21st Century has also set a low introductory price to increase VFI/400's acceptance in a tight economy.

In 1995, 21st Century acquired DR/VFI, which was originally developed by another company in 1988. In late 2000, 21st ported DR/VFI to OS/400. The Wayne, Pennsylvania, company had beta sites for VFI/400, and at least one customer was using it in early production. But 21st Century failed to give VFI/400 the marketing support it needed to get off the ground and to ensure its success as a viable product. It never really made it out of the beta phase.

Today, 21st Century is ready to give VFI/400 a second shot. And why not? Security, disaster recovery, and high availability are hot topics as companies work to shore up their systems and reduce their exposure to threats before embarking on new IT projects.

A big problem with many companies' backup and recovery strategies is that they don't prioritize their data, says Pete Wilson, a spokesman for 21st Century Software. "They tend to take a big-bang, all-or-nothing approach," he says.

VFI/400 addresses this all-or-nothing approach by allowing a company to segment and prioritize the different types of data that reside in an OS/400 server, for backup and restore activities. For example, there may be year-old spool files sitting right next to this week's payroll data, but it's much more crucial to get the payroll data back online during a recovery.

That's what VFI/400 is designed to do. "We're trying to reduce the universe of files that you need to get an application back on the air, so you're not going to spend a lot of time backing up files you don't need," Wilson says. "We'll allow you to do the restore by applications, so if apps are not important and don't have to be up right away, they can wait until another time."

VFI/400 works by detecting which files and applications are used most often, grouping those files into a logical unit, then creating a separate save process for that logical unit. While administrators set up the VFI/400 backup schedule for those logical units through the VFI/400 interface, the actual backup itself is conducted by a company's standard backup and recovery software, such as the native OS/400 backup facility, IBM Tivoli ADSM, and other "data movers." VFI/400 also reduces backup windows by using the Save While Active functionality that IBM has included in OS/400 to manage the logical save process.

VFI/400 1.0 is generally available now. Besides the new support for ADSM and other data movers, VFI/400's functionality is not much different from what 21st Century introduced two years ago. To the upcoming 2.0 release, which Wilson says will be introduced later this year, 21st Century developers will add the capability to manage multiple instances of VFI/400 on multiple servers from one centrally located PC.

For a limited time, 21st Century is offering licenses for VFI/400 for $1,500. This price includes the first year of maintenance. At some point (company sources were not specific about when), the price will return to $7,500, and companies that purchased VFI/400 this year for $1,500 will have to pay the full maintenance price, which is 15 percent, or about $1,200, to continue receiving maintenance. For more information, go to www.21stcenturysoftware.com.