IBM i Shops Climb Into the VAULT

December 2, 2014 Alex Woodie

United Computer Group has landed two new customers for VAULT400, its hosted offering for IBM i backups and disaster recovery as a service. The new customers include R.W. Sidley of Ohio and Mid-America Door of Oklahoma.

R.W. Sidley has been a UCG customer for more than 20 years and recently included backup as a service (BaaS) using VAULT400. The company, which supplies ready-mix concrete among other construction materials, decided to bolster the security of its IBM i-resident data by utilizing the VAULT400 service to house backups.

Instead of handling the backups manually, the company uses VAULT400 to automatically process the nightly backups. After compressing and encrypting the data, VAULT400 sends the backups offsite to two UCG data centers, located in Cleveland, Ohio, and Atlanta, Georgia.

“VAULT400 is working great,” says Brad Buescher, the HR director for the Painesville, Ohio, company. The fact that R.W. Sidley worked with UCG for 20 years played heavily in the decision to use VAULT400, he added. The company elected not to buy the DR option, which is available in 12- and 24-hour recovery time objective (RTO) options.

Meanwhile, Mid-America Door seems to be happy with its VAULT400 implementation. The Ponca City, Oklahoma, company uses an IBM i ERP system from Friedman and was shopping for online backup solutions.

After initially selecting a different online backup solution, Mid-America Door decided to cancel the implementation and seek a second opinion. Carl Christensen, vice president and COO of the company, consulted with Friedman, which recommended UCG and its VAULT400 solution.

The implementation went smoothly, and now Mid-America Door’s IBM i data is protected by VAULT400. “I have peace of mind now that I know our data is securely backed up every day, and that I picked the right team with the knowledge to make it happen,” Christensen says.