You Store The Crown Jewels In A Safe, Not In A Bucket

March 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

All petabytes are not equal. A petabyte of unstructured data that may have a few nuggets of informational gold veins running through it, for instance, is definitely a lot more valuable than a petabyte of cat videos. But it is not anywhere nearly as valuable as the database and application code backups of thousands of customers running IBM i systems.

And that, in a nutshell, is why Fresche Solutions, which is perhaps best known as a provider of application and database modernization tools in the IBM i market, but which is also a cloud in its own right as well as a managed services provider for IBM’s Power Virtual Server cloud, did some deep technical reviews when its disk-based Data Domain data de-duplication storage systems were getting a little long in the tooth.

The Data Domain backup storage is built by Dell Technologies, and was used not only to provide backups for Fresche itself, but more importantly for IBM i customers using its Backup as a Service (BaaS) utility. To be specific, Fresche had three Data Domain platforms in its production environment and two in its disaster recovery facilities.

All told, the Data Domain arrays had about 1.7 petabytes of total capacity, and while that may not sound like a lot, it really is when you consider that the typical database at an IBM i shop might be hundreds of megabytes to maybe a terabyte or two. The three Data Domains in the production environment replicated to two Data Domains in the disaster recovery site, and the reason it wasn’t three to three is that in some of the environments that were being replicated are test and development environments or archive environments and customers reckon that in a Tier Four datacenter the odds that there will be a disaster that will wipe out their data is really small. Those replicating databases and applications obviously want the standard 1-2-3 coverage of the primary backup, the secondary backup, and offsite backup just in case.

“All of the Data Domains were operating at near 90 percent capacity,” explains David Baggette, director of cloud operations at Fresche. “And we were hitting some challenges in terms of performance. We have service-level agreements that we must meet to make sure the backups complete in a certain timeframe, and the Data Domains were getting us uncomfortably close to the limits of those SLAs.”

“If you are backing up personal videos to an S3 bucket, it makes little difference whether this takes one hour or twelve,” Baggette continues. “These are not the types of backups that we are performing, as mission-critical backups often require system downtime to complete. This data is critical to our customers’ operations, revenue, and regulatory compliance, and downtime leads to lost revenue. Most of our clients utilize flash copy via a tool called Flash for I from M82 to manage the service, take it off storage, and send it to the backup.”

This is all well and good, but now the backup windows are getting squeezed on the Data Domains. Which means the Data Domain arrays would either need to be upgraded or replaced.

And given that Fresche has a strong partnership with IBM with its Power Virtual Server cloud, which delivers IBM i and AIX capacity for rent that runs in IBM’s own datacenters, and that FalconStor’s StorSafe virtual tape library (VTL) software is one of two backup and archive tools natively running on the Power Virtual Server cloud – and is really the primary one at that – FalconStor was in the running to replace those Data Domains.

The Data Domain appliances are well-regarded, which is why Fresche acquired them in the first place. But they are also known as a premium product that carries a premium price. This is why EMC paid $2.4 billion in 2009 to outbid NetApp, which was willing to shell out $1.5 billion, to acquire Data Domain, and this is also one of the reasons why Dell spent an incredible $67 billion to acquire EMC and VMware. The latter has been spun off and acquired by Broadcom, but the former is still a cash cow inside of Dell.

“Dell’s Data Domain offerings are appliance-based – everything is bundled together: storage, controllers, and hardware, all delivered with a single bill,” adds Baggette. “FalconStor StorSafe, on the other hand, is truly software-defined, which gives us significantly more flexibility. We can deploy it on hardware of our choosing and enforce internal build standards to maintain consistency. StorSafe also runs within PowerVS and can be deployed anywhere – on premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment. It can operate as a virtual machine at a client site with as little as 2 TB of backup capacity and be centrally managed through a single console. This flexibility allows us to better balance capacity and operational management. Ultimately, the software-defined architecture is where we see the most value, making FalconStor the natural choice for deploying new VTL capacity.”

Which is precisely what Fresche is in the process of doing right now. And it doesn’t take anything fancy to do it. It is just a bunch of X86 servers with RAID 6 drives that can deliver a certain level of performance for the StorSafe software.

But there is another set of benefits that come from switching to StorSafe for backups compared to sticking with the Data Domain architecture, which is now getting close to two and a half decades old. (Not that legacy necessarily means stagnation, mind you. It doesn’t have to or always mean that, as the IBM i platform shows.) The compression and deduplication ratios for StorSafe running on stock server hardware are higher than on the Data Domain arrays, and the performance is better, too.

Baggette elaborates: “The deduplication ratios we see on the Data Domain systems average about 5:1 across nearly 2 PB of customer data. With FalconStor StorSafe, we are currently estimating a deduplication ratio of approximately 10:1, with the potential for even higher efficiency as more data is ingested over time. The most important outcome is that we can store significantly more data using far less storage hardware. StorSafe performs in-line deduplication, compressing and deduplicating data in memory in real-time, which reduces backend writes and improves performance. This allows us to ingest substantially more data at much higher speeds than with Data Domain’s post-processing deduplication. Just as importantly, it eliminates the need for the lengthy Data Domain cleanup process, which could become extremely burdensome, taking 36 hours to 48 hours when utilization reaches around 80 percent. With our StorSafe-based solution, those challenges are no longer an issue.”

The plan for Fresche right now is to have two StorSafe production clusters and two StorSafe disaster recovery clusters for the big customers of its BaaS utility. For the smaller customers using BaaS, the plan is for Fresche to install StorSafe locally at customer sites and manage all of the customers from a single pane of glass, which it can do with the FalconStor management tool StorSight, and then have them backup to either the Fresche datacenters or to IBM’s PowerVS cloud using IBM’s Backup, Recovery, and Media Services (BRMS) as a front end. They have no idea they are not talking to the world’s fastest tape drive, but to a FalconStor VTL.

And because StorSafe is priced by the amount of de-duped storage under management, not by system count or core counts or some other metric, Fresche knows exactly what its licensing costs will be as its BaaS business grows. And the license that Fresche has to StorSafe can be deployed anywhere – customer sites with managed services contracts, its own datacenters, or on the PowerVS cloud. FalconStor doesn’t care, and that means Fresche doesn’t have to, either.

This content is sponsored by FalconStor Software.

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