FalconStor Doubles Down On IBM Power With Habanero Offsite Data Protection

January 19, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the secrets to the success and longevity of the OS/400 and IBM i platform is integration for the sake of simplicity. That may be two closely interrelated secrets, now that we think about it, but the important thing is that for any product or service to take off among the IBM i faithful, it has to integrate well with the platform and it has to mask complexity even when an underlying technology might be quite hairy.

With the rise of many clouds and hosters based on Power Systems machinery and the desire to get offsite data protection to ensure the restorability of vital corporate data stored on the IBM i platform in the event of a natural or human-created disaster, it has always been a wonder to us that all of the key three operating systems on Power Systems – IBM i, AIX, and Linux – did not have an easy button to do remote backups to the cloud. This is much less of a hassle than making tape backups and storing them offsite in a vault in a mountain cave somewhere, and it is also much easier and quicker to restore a system from, too.

With a new offsite data protection service, called Habanero, FalconStor, arguably the dominant supplier of virtual tape library software for the Power Systems market, wants to be the “easy button” for IBM i shops looking to do offsite backups from their product systems to protect themselves from disasters and to airgap that data so it cannot be corrupted by bad actors or human error. And the neat bit about this is that FalconStor is creating this Habanero offsite data protection service and running it on the IBM Cloud for compute and the IBM Cloud Object Storage for storage.

No Stranger To IBM i

FalconStor, as many of you know, was founded in 2000 and is one of the pioneers in software-defined storage and in virtual tape libraries that look and feel like real tape drives and libraries but are really software that runs on X86 or Power servers that fakes out the servers they are attached to.

Way back in April 2008, IBM bought Diligent Technologies to integrate its ProtecTier data deduplication software into its virtual tape libraries and data backup and recovery software, but IBM stopped selling ProtecTier in November 2019 and ended support for various versions between November 2020 and November 2022, essentially leaving the market open to third parties like FalconStor, LaserVault, and others.

“So we moved in and began to migrate customers to StorSafe,” Todd Brooks, chief executive officer at FalconStor, tells The Four Hundred. FalconStor itself got out of the hardware business and did a partnership with DSI to create a VTL appliance, which was great for those customers who wanted to maintain backups on local storage within their datacenters. For those customers who want to run StorSafe on their own storage servers, they can buy the software directly from FalconStor, and over the years, more than 900 Power Systems shops have done so, and the majority of them are running the IBM i operating system, according to Brooks.

There are also nearly two dozen managed service providers in the IBM i market that offer backup and archiving services based on FalconStor software to their respective customers. When you add it all up across 27 countries worldwide, StorSafe is underpinning 3.7 exabytes – that is 3,700 petabytes – of IBM i data protection. Considering that most relational databases on the IBM i platform are hundreds of megabytes to multiple terabytes of capacity, 3.7 exabytes is a hell of a lot of critical data that is being protected against disasters and hackers.

“We have really been able to carve out an interesting position for ourselves within the IBM i ecosystem, and we have a very healthy growth rate on our hybrid cloud business,” says Brooks. “But one of the things that we have seen, especially when we talk hybrid cloud within IBM Power, is that customers, partners, and even IBM themselves tend to think about these in two silos – on premises and cloud – rather than thinking about them as one big silo. And the standard best practice for all IBM i shops is to keep one copy of data offsite. Historically, you throw tapes into Iron Mountain, or keep them somewhere else. In some countries today, regulations requires offsite data protection and we are even seeing insurance companies require this for cybersecurity policies.”

Brooks wants to sell a lot more StorSafe software, and after mulling it over, FalconStor decided the best way to do this was to leverage the 21 worldwide Power VS datacenters that IBM operates and the IBM Cloud Object Store available in the IBM Cloud (which is adjacent to the Power VS datacenters) to create the Habanero offsite data protection service itself.

The Habanero service has three components, as shown below:

Habanero Ignite is an on-premises gateway that can run on a bare metal X86 or Power server or in a virtual machine on an X86 or Power servers. However customers want to do it, FalconStor provides the Habanero appliance free of charge because its job is not to do data replication to a local system, but to feed it up to one of 60 of the IBM Cloud datacenters worldwide that offer IBM Cloud Object Store object storage. Between the two sits an ultrafast data transport layer (also based on FalconStor technology) called Habanero Blaze that can backup data to the IBM Cloud about 20X faster than a normal connection, according to Brooks.

To get the Habanero service, which has been beta testing at key customers for the past six months, IBM i shops go to the IBM Cloud catalog and order it. Then the Habanero Operations Team, or HOT for short, reaches out to customers and figures out how much data they have, whatever regional and national limits they might have on data movement, and other factors in their environment. They get the Habanero Ignite appliance, HOT walks them through how to set it up and link it to their IBM i systems, very likely using IBM’s own Backup and Recovery Media Services (BRMS) tool for IBM i. FalconStor runs the StorSafe VTL on the Power VS cloud on the other side of the link and pushes data to IBM Cloud Object Store. Easy peasy.

The resulting Habanero service kills a few birds with one stone. First, it provides offsite data protection with an airgap, which is important in a world where systems can be compromised by hackers because of a continuous stream of security vulnerabilities in all systems, include those running IBM i. The Habanero service also provides offsite data retention that is immutable and therefore meets various regulatory and compliance requirements in various industries and countries. Habanero can also be the means by which IBM i shops do long-term archival storage, and data can be easily replicated across as many IBM Cloud sites as the customers need and provide auditors with the assurances of the data being secure and replicated.

A Simple Product Deserves A Simple Price

On most clouds, figuring out the cost of renting compute is relatively straight-forward. But reckoning the cost of networking and storage as data moves in and out of the cloud can be tricky. Usually the bill ends up being bigger than many had been expecting.

With the Habanero service, FalconStor is keeping it simple, with an active tier and an archive tier. Both are priced based on the capacity consumed, with a granularity of 1 TB in both cases:

In both tiers, FalconStor is not charging for operational writes, data retrieval, or network egress, all of which are common in one form or another on various clouds. FalconStor is giving customers a 30 percent discount off list price. The active tier can store data from on premises systems or offsite cloud instances both, as the customer sees fit because this is a hybrid cloud world, but the point is to have an offsite backup of critical data no matter where it is residing.

The Habanero active tier starts at $2,500 per month for up to 250 TB in an active tier and scales up from there at $10 per TB per month. Customers make an annual commitment, but pay for it monthly, which is reasonable. The archive tier is in addition to the active tier, and is meant to provide tape migration and long-term data retention into the IBM Cloud. After the discount, it costs $2 per TB per month to do Habanero archives. If you restore data from the archive tier to the active tier, it costs $16.50 per TB.

Either way, the HOT staff monitors the systems each day and makes sure everything is moving data around as it should, and provides monthly reporting that all is well. And none of the customers have to learn anything about StorSafe or the IBM Cloud or Power VS. It just works, and FalconStor makes sure it stays working as part of those fees.

Over the long haul, if and when customers need it, FalconStor can extend Habanero to the other Power clouds out there, such as LightEdge (Connectria), Skytap/Microsoft Azure, Google, or any of a number of others who offer Power Systems in cloudy slices.

What Brooks is focused on for now, though, is increasing the IBM i base for offsite data protection by an order of magnitude, which obviously will have a dramatic effect on the sales and profits at FalconStor as well as bring a large part of the IBM i base into the modern, hybrid cloud world with the easiest and most logical first step: data protection. This is how Microsoft first built up the Azure behemoth, with backup services for Windows Server and SQL Server, and there is no reason to believe the same thing can’t happen with IBM i shops with the right product, packaging, and pricing.

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