Tectrade to Sell LaserVault UBD in Europe

October 22, 2013 Alex Woodie

Tectrade, a Dutch provider of IBM i solutions in several countries, this month announced that it has picked up and will start selling Electronic Storage Corp.‘s LaserVault Universal Backup Device (UBD) to clients in Europe.

Antoni Uni, a service transition consultant with Tectrade, explained his company’s decision to re-sell the LaserVault backup device to clients in the BeNeLux (Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg) region.

“We selected LaserVault’s UBD because it will give our customers a tapeless backup solution and at the same time optimize the use of their current storage equipment,” Uni says in a press release. “Most of the third party backup solutions on the iSeries market cannot be used to backup and restore the complete iSeries including the Licensed Internal Code [LIC], where UBD can be used as an alternate IPL device.”

Disk-to-disk (D2D) and virtual tape library (VTL) offerings have become popular due to the flexibility advantages they provide over standard tape-based backup processes. Features like data replication, encryption, and data de-duplication are often built into the backup devices, providing advantages in the areas of security and disaster recovery (DR).

“Customers with storage replication to a second datacenter are the customers who benefit the most from using UBD,” Uni continues. “When the customer backs up their iSeries data to a storage platform that replicates the data to a second DC [data center], with UBD, the customer’s iSeries backup is automatically offsite without any tape handling. Without a second storage server it is also easy to do a DUPTAP, or with use of BRMS a DUPMEDBRM, because the UBD appliance is seen as a normal tape device.”

El Store says its LaserVault-powered UBD offering connects to IBM i servers via Fibre Channel, and can either store the backups itself or offload them to other storage devices. These other storage devices could be a NAS, SAN, or any de-duplication or VTL appliance that supports CIFS, NFS or iSCSI connections, including those from DataDomain, CommVault, GreenBytes, NetApp , Quantum, or Exagrid.

Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Electronic Storage Corp. has been ramping up the marketing momentum in recent weeks. In addition to signing Tectrade (which has a Delaware office), El Store signed the UK-based IBM business partner APSU to provide LaserVault Backup as a service in the UK.