StarWind Hooks VTL to IBM i
March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops that are looking to add a virtual tape library (VTL) to their IT mix may want to check out StarWind, a Rocket Division Software spin-off that provides a range of storage virtualization and software-defined storage offerings. The company recently added support for IBM i with its VTL solution, opening up a new market for itself in the midrange.
StarWind bills itself as a provider of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions for the enterprise remote office/branch office (ROBO), small and midsize business (SMB), and the edge. The company, which began in 2008 as a spin-off from Rocket Division Software in Beverly, Massachusetts, develops a range of paid and free software offerings as well as hardware appliances loaded with its software.
The company is perhaps best known for its Virtual SAN (VSAN) offering, which enables customers to create a SAN on their X86 platform of choice. Another popular StarWind product is the Virtual HCI Appliance (VHCA), which bundles the VSAN offering along with third-party software-defined compute, storage, networking, and virtualization products.
The company also sells VTL and an NVME-oF Initiator software, which provides NVMe over Fibre Channel connectivity via TCP and RoCE v2 networks. Hardware appliances for the HCA and VTL offerings are also on tap from the international company, as well as for backup and video surveillance.
Earlier this year, the company — which was forced to evacuate about 80 of its employees from Kiev, Ukraine to Poland following the Russian invasion in 2022 — added support for IBM i with the VTL offering. In a recent blog post on the StarWind website, StarWind VTL Product Manager Orest Lesyuk explained how the company did it.
“StarWind recently added a new virtual tape library into the build that emulates IBM 3584 TS3500 tape library, making it compatible with IBM i and offers cloud offload to public cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Backblaze B2, and Wasabi,” Lesyuk wrote on the blog.
The StarWind VTL appliance.
The StarWind VTL software runs on Windows and Linux and supports iSCSI and Fibre Channel connections to hosts. The company touts its capability to replicate and tier backups to various object storage systems running in the cloud, thereby providing “airgapped” storage that is resistant to ransomware. The software also sports a graphical management console where users can configure, manage, and monitor VTL activities.
The StarWind Management Console allows users to connect to IBM i through a graphical, wizard-like interface.
StarWind offers both free and paid versions of its VTL software. The main difference between the free and paid versions is the paid version supports an unlimited number of virtual tapes and allows users to store data on-prem as well as in the cloud (thereby providing speedier local restores). The free version only stores data in the cloud and limits the user to four virtual tapes.
The StarWind VTL Appliance are 2U devices that come in three flavors: VTL-160, VTL-320, and VTL-640, which refers to the appliances’ usable capacity (in terabytes). All StarWind VTL Appliances sport two 1GbE and two 10 GbE network adapters, with an option for 25 GbE. Users also have the option of hooking physical tape drives or libraries off the appliance, using SAS, SCSI, or Fibre Channel connections.
In terms of backup software, the StarWind VTL Appliances support more than a dozen enterprise backup products, including Acronis Backup, ArcServe Backup and UDP, Bacula, Commvault, EMC AVAMAR and NetWorker, IBM TSM and Spectrum Protect, HP DataProtector, Microsoft DPM, Unitrends, Veeam Backup & Replication, Veritas BackupExec and NetBackup, and Quest NetVault Backup.
In his blog post, Lesyuk walked the reader through the process of setting up the StarWinds VTL software running on a Windows Server 2019 machine to an IBM Power S922 server running IBM i 7.5. As Lesyuk explains, the setup is quite straightforward, thanks to the wizard-like GUI process StarWinds has set up.
There are other options for VTL solutions in the midrange market, but having StarWind in the game gives IBM i shops another option, which is always good. The fact that StarWind is aware of the IBM i and its legacy also doesn’t hurt.
“IBM i, without a doubt, has a special place in the IT world,” Lesyuk wrote. “Younger generations of system administrators may have very little knowledge of IBM i and can even consider it legacy. However, the latest IBM Power Systems, as well as older AS/400 systems, are still utilized by many organizations due to their robust and reliable system architectures.”
You can find more information on the company’s offerings at its website at www.starwindsoftware.com.
