Electronic Storage Taps Japanese Reseller to Carry LaserVault UBD

April 15, 2014 Alex Woodie

Electronic Storage Corp., the company behind the LaserVault line of backup products, announced that Sanwa Comtec has expanded its product offerings and is now carrying the LaserVault Universal Backup Device (UBD) products in Japan and India.

El Store and Sanwa Comtec previously had a relationship for LaserVault Backup, the Tulsa, Oklahoma, company’s software-based backup offering. In late March, the pair expanded their relationship when the Tokyo IT services firm announced it would start selling the LaserVault UBD to its clients.

The UBD appliance was launched in late 2010 to provide IBM i and Linux shops with a low-cost and easy-to-use alternative to a virtual tape library (VTL). The appliance is an X86 server that connects to the IBM i or Linux server via Fibre Channel and provides terabytes of RAID-protected storage.

“I believe this new product, LaserVault UBD, has great possibilities and we want to extensively develop the market in tandem with LaserVault,” Sanwa Comtec CEO Shinichiro Kakizawa said in a statement. The company’s general manager of solution sales, Satoshi Tojoh, added that with transfer speeds (409 MB/second) exceeding LTO5, the product “responds to the user needs in the era of big data.”

In addition to the LaserVault UBD appliance and the LaserVault Backup software offering, Electronic Storage Corp. also sells UBD Synch, which is an add-on to the UBD appliance that provides replication of compressed and encrypted backup data from a primary UBD appliance to a secondary UBD appliance, or to a separate NAS file server. The company launched that product in late 2013.