VAULT400 Updates Backup Agent

September 16, 2008 Alex Woodie

System i shops using the VAULT400 online backup and recovery service from United Computer Group will experience faster, more trouble-free backups thanks to an updated backup agent for i OS, the company says. The new agent also supports the latest release of the OS/400 operating system, now called IBM i, as well as new security capabilities.

Cleveland, Ohio-based UCG launched VAULT400 two years ago to capitalize on the growing interest in remote backup and disaster recovery (DR) services utilizing high-speed Internet connections. While tape-based processes continue to dominate backup and DR plans, security and reliability concerns of backup tapes is spurring many companies to consider network-based, or disk-to-disk (D2D) technologies to protect their vital data.

VAULT400 is based in part on online backup technology that UCG obtained through a partnership with EVault of Emeryville, California (now owned by Seagate). The VAULT400 operation is run out of a data center in Columbus, Ohio, and supports all types of i OS files (native DB2/400 and IFS), as well as Windows, Unix, and Linux systems.

Last week, UCG announced Agent version 6.0, a new release of the core underlying technology powering VAULT400. UCG says the new agent will improve the performance of backup and restore operations for VAULT400 customers. The performance improvements in Agent 6.0 are largely due to its DeltaPro technology, which takes periodic “snapshots” of data and uses compression to minimize the amount of data sent over the wire.

UCG says the updated agent will improve the backup performance the most for “small object workflows.” Thanks to DeltaPro’s new capability to automatically regenerate the index file when problems are detected, users can avoid the need to periodically “reseed” the data vault, or completely rebuild the backup from scratch, which is time-consuming and bandwidth-draining.

New VAULT400 customers will get up and running more quickly thanks to a new backup job creation utility that helps to optimize workflow configuration. Support for IBM i 6.1 (formerly i5/OS V6R1) and the 256 bit AES encryption algorithm round out the new features in this release.

VAULT400’s Agent version 6.0 is available now. For more information visit www.vault400.com.