Venyu Delivers Online Backup and Recovery for Kawasaki
November 1, 2011 Alex Woodie
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Kawasaki Motors Corp. USA has selected Venyu to provide it with online backup services for its IBM i and Windows servers, the vendor announced last month. After comparing the various online backup providers, Kawasaki says it picked Venyu (formerly AmeriVault) for its capability to house large amounts of data at a reasonable price. Venyu provides online backup, disaster recovery, and cloud hosting services to about 1,200 companies, primarily along the Gulf Coast and the Eastern Seaboard. As a partner of i365, the vendor uses the EVault online backup technology to move data from its clients’ IBM i, Windows, Unix, and Linux servers to one of its four data centers. It also provides cloud hosting capabilities and virtualization services for X64-based machines and applications (but not for IBM i environments). Venyu’s biggest assets are its data centers. The company owns and runs two data centers, including one at his headquarters in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and another near AmeriVault’s old headquarters near Boston, Massachusetts. It also rents out space in data centers in Bossier City, Louisiana, and the subterranean facility 85 feet underground in Springfield, Missouri. This geographical spread across the country ensures that no single disaster can take out all of Venyu’s data centers. The data protection afforded by multiple locations was attractive to Kawasaki Motors Corp. USA, an affiliate of the Japanese manufacturing giant that distributes the company’s motorcycles, ATVs, and personal watercrafts to more than 1,500 Kawasaki dealers in the U.S. and Canada. KMC, which has annual revenues of more than $1.6 billion, is based in Irvine, California, and has regional offices throughout the country. KMC is a longtime user of the IBM midrange server, but it also uses its share of Windows servers. This need to back up multiple platforms was what initially attracted KMC to Venue, the vendor says. “Because of our broad breadth of platforms and capability to back up multiple types of operating systems, our solution became a natural fit for Kawasaki,” Venyu account manager Eric Gere tells IT Jungle. “They didn’t need to have two or three backup providers to back up all their data, because we can handle pretty much any type of operating system that’s out there. So it just became a really nice easy fit for Kawasaki.” KMC data center supervisor James Grande says price was a big factor, too. “We searched for a trusted partner that would help us push our many gigabytes of data to the cloud with limited bandwidth for a reasonable price,” Grande says in a press release. “Venyu’s backup client deduplicates and compresses before it sends our data across the wire, allowing us to backup our systems with very limited impact on our Internet connection.” The fact that Venyu only charges for the amount of deduplicated data it stores for KMC also worked in the vendor’s favor. “If I send 100 GB of data to Venyu, and it dedupes to 20 GB, I only pay for 20 GB of used space. During these financially hard times, that is a win-win situation,” Grande says. Venyu stores its customers backup data on NetApp devices, which enables the company to replicate the data across multiple data centers. In the event that KMC or another Venyu customer needs to recover the data, they can initiate a point-in-time recovery over the Web, or have a disk or tape sent to their business or recovery site. Venyu does not run IBM i servers, and so cannot offer IBM i processing capability for customers to use in the event of a disaster. It offers more advanced disaster recovery and high availability services for customers running on industry standard Intel servers. 2011 has been a big year for disasters in North America, and the folks at Venyu detect that customers are more receptive to hearing the DR message today that they were years ago. “We get into conversations with customers about disaster recovery, and when you have floods and hurricanes and power outages, it’s really starting to hit home,” Gere says. “The conversations are not at the IT director level anymore. We’re talking to the C-level personnel, because they’re worried about their business. It’s not just, ‘How am I going to back up this file server?’ It’s ‘How am I going to keep my business up and running during a disaster?'” For more information on Venyu’s online backup solutions for IBM i and other platforms, see the company’s website at www.venyu.com. RELATED STORY AmeriVault Debuts DR Service for i OS Servers
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