Barsa Consulting Inks Reseller Agreement with BOSaNOVA

Published: July 9, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Barsa Consulting has inked an agreement with BOSaNOVA that will see Barsa Consulting reselling BOSaNOVA's new Q3 storage encryption security appliance.

Barsa Consulting is, of course, the well-known System i business partner where Al Barsa, one of the foundation stones in the System i community, gets his paychecks so he can pay to put Albert Junior through his studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Barsa Consulting works the New York City metropolitan area and is located in IBM's stomping grounds in Westchester County, New York. Because of the nature of the financial services sector that surrounds New York City, Barsa Consulting is where some of the largest AS/400, iSeries, and System i shops in the world buy their systems and get various software and services. BOSaNOVA is headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, and sells thin clients, connectivity software, and other appliances--including the new Q3 box.

"BOSaNOVA is pleased to partner with Barsa Consulting, not only because of their expertise and reputation in the System i market, but because they share our commitment to protecting customers from the danger of data security breaches," said Martin Pladgeman, BOSaNOVA's president as he made the announcement at the annual System i and AS/400 Connection Conference in Naples, Florida, after we went to press with the prior issue of this newsletter. "Many System i customers are not aware that it's as easy to read System i backup data to a PC as it is any other type of data. It's great to have experienced resellers like Barsa to educate System i customers on the importance of encrypting their data at rest."

The Q3 appliance is actually brought into the States by BOSaNOVA from a British company called DISUK. The rack-mounted appliance, which is called the Paranoia2 by DISUK, has two 3DES encryption engines in the box and SCSI interface links so it can sit between the server with the data on it and the tape drive where they data is being archived. As the data is passed from the server to the tape, it is passed through both encryption engines, which means you have to break not one, but two keys to hack the resulting files. The device also compresses the data before it is passed to the tape drives, and it does not interfere in any way with commands being passed between servers and tape drives.

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New BOSaNOVA Appliance Encrypts Tape Backups

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