Stelo Touts Data Replication For IBM i In Azure Cloud
September 29, 2025 Alex Woodie
If you are in the market for data replication software for IBM i, you might want to check out Stelo (formerly StarQuest). The company has supported the IBM i server for many years, and recently announced that its software is available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
Stelo got its start back in 1992, when Paul Rampel founded StarQuest to develop data connectivity tools for IBM, Microsoft, and Cisco Systems environments. The company launched the Host Data Replicator (HDR) product in 1998, when was adapted with real-time capabilities to become the StarQuest Data Replicator (SQDR) product in 2001.
In 2022, StarQuest changed its name to Stelo. While the name and branding changed, the focus on developing data replication software continued. Today, the company supports more than 30 data sources and destinations through ODBC and JDBC connectivity, including Db2 for i, Db2 for LUW, SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB, MySQL, Postgres, and Informix. It supports databases running on-prem and in Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Salesforce, as well as Confluent’s hosted version of Apache Kafka. It also offers specialized connectors for specific target environments, such as Databricks, Snowflake, and Google BigQuery.
The company is quite familiar with the IBM i and Db2 for i environment, having worked with it for the past 25 years. The company claims its software is capable of replicating millions of transactions from the IBM i server per hour.
“We understand both the IBM i operating system and the integrated relational database to seamlessly bridge your Db2 database within a larger data ecosystem,” the company says on its website. “We can connect all source and destination types for every database, so you can move data from Db2 to anywhere.”
Stelo sells its software with three slightly different solution types, including data mirroring, data migration, and data streaming. Data mirroring is used to replicate data from a production source in real time to another source, such as a data warehouse for offloading of reporting or analytics use cases or to a backup site for disaster recovery purposes.
Data migration involves moving data off a legacy system to a target. It’s designed to minimize downtime and ensure the integrity of data. Data migration uses SSL encryption and uses multi-threaded loading to speed up data transfers. Data streaming brings fast transfers of large data sets using Apache Kafka or its Spark connector for integration with Databricks environments.
Stelo enhanced the GUI of its offering with the introduction of version 6.51 earlier this year. “Stelo V6.51 delivers a user experience that matches the performance and reliability our customers trust,” said Rampel, who is the CEO and president of Stelo.
Stelo provides a no-code, GUI-based data replication environment.
The GUI lets users set up data replication, configure the different jobs, and monitor the replication. Customers have fine-grained control over how replication is configured and handled, such as what database driver is used, what the data replication interval is, buffer sizes, size limits, multithread and multirow fetch and insert, multithread time-out.
Stelo also keeps a detailed log of all data replication activities. Customers can view tasks that have already been scheduled and run to completion, including the start time, run time, source, target, how it was scheduled, status, and any additional messages or errors. Customers can also configure the log viewer to suit their needs.
One Stelo customer is Top Notch Distributors, a Rosemont, Illinois-based distributor of hardware for commercial and residential doors. The company needed a way to push data from its IBM i-based ERP system into an ecommerce website running on a SQL Server backend. The company selected Stelo to feed the real-time data from Db2 for i into SQL Server, enabling the company to keep its online store and reports up-to-date with the latest data form the ERP system.
“I’m an SQL guy, not an AS/400 guy,” Top Notch Distributor’s IT Manager Jon Fehringer said in a case study on the Stelo site “Other vendors we checked into were not able to easily upload data into the AS/400 like Stelo can. Now, changes are implemented in minutes, without a load on the AS/400.”
Earlier this month, Stelo announced that its software is now available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. The company says its approach to building direct connections from sources to destinations, including Databricks (which runs on Azure), improves performance and reduces overhead, whether using data mirroring or data streaming topologies.
“With our Azure Marketplace listing, teams can get started faster and stay focused on results,” Rampel said. The company plans to launch soon on Google Cloud Marketplace and Amazon Web Services Marketplace.
