Venyu Hooks Up with CMA for Cloud Backup

December 3, 2013 Alex Woodie

Venyu, a cloud backup and recovery provider, and IBM business partner and midrange server reseller CMA Technology Solutions last week announced the formation of a partnership aimed at providing cloud backup and recovery solutions for IBM i shops.

Venyu provides cloud-based backup, disaster recovery, and cloud hosting services to more than 1,200 customers, primarily those in the Southeast and Gulf Coast region. The company operates several data centers across the country, including one at its headquarters in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and others in Massachusetts and Missouri.

Venyu already had an IBM i business practice, and had a number of IBM i customers. Among Venyu’s IBM i customers is Kawasaki Motors Corp., the Irvine, California-based company whose use of Venyu’s service we profiled here two years ago.

However, up until now, Venyu has not run any IBM i servers in its data centers, thereby limiting the usefulness of Venyu for IBM i customers in the event of a disaster. When we last wrote about the company in 2011, the company was grabbing IBM i data using EVault‘s software, and storing it on industry-standard NetApp devices, right alongside data from Windows- and Linux-based systems. The company offered more advanced disaster recovery and high availability services for customers running on industry standard Intel servers. But for IBM i customers, Venyu’s offerings were relegated to providing a convenient, Internet-accessible storage mechanism, but nothing to run IBM i workloads on in the event of a disaster.

That is all changing as a result of Venyu’s new partnership with CMA, which is also based in Baton Rouge and is a large IBM server reseller in the Gulf Coast region. According to the announcement, CMA will provide IBM i hardware for use by Venyu in its data centers. It will also provide technical expertise on the IBM i server for Venyu’s backup and DR services, which it dubs RestartIT.

This is good news for IBM i customers in the Gulf Coast region who are looking for a local company to provide cloud-based backup and disaster recovery capabilities. With CMA partnering with Venyu, it will provide more IBM i capabilities for the RestartIT service, according to Ben Cherbonnier, founder and president of CMA.

“The heritage of IBM System i goes back 35 years, and many businesses and public sector entities still rely on it today. But for these customers, the challenge of backup and recovery has always been difficult,” Cherbonnier says. “Teaming with CMA, Venyu can now provide customers with the IBM System i hardware and expertise to offer appropriate cloud back-up and remote administration.”

For more information, see www.restartit.com and www.cmaontheweb.com.