IBM Launches Hybrid Cloud Backup Product With Cobalt Iron
March 9, 2026 Alex Woodie
IBM and its business partner Cobalt Iron last week announced the launch of a new cloud backup product. Dubbed Secure Automated Backup with Compass for IBM Cloud, the new SaaS offering can protect data residing across customers’ landscape, including IBM Cloud, other clouds, and on-prem systems like IBM i.
Cobalt Iron was founded in 2013 with the goal of modernizing backup and recovery. Founder Richard Spurlock saw that companies were spending too much time with platform-specific backup products, so he decided to build a centralized virtual tape library (VTL) solution that could back up and recover data across a range of popular platforms, file systems, and databases.
Cobalt Iron targeted IBM i with its VTL offering, which it sold either as a hardware appliance or as software. The product supported native IBM i backup routines, such as full system saves, BRMS, or third-party backup tools (like RobotSAVE), and moved the data using LTO drive emulation.
Beyond the data connectivity, Cobalt Iron used REST APIs to pull metadata, which it used to automate various backup tasks, such as managing backup policies, provisioning new resources, monitoring data replication, and managing the underlying server the backup data lives on.
The Lawrence, Kansas, company cemented a partnership with IBM in 2021 when it announced that its Compass product had been added to IBM Passport Advantage program. Since then, the partnership has expanded to include a version of Compass for IBM’s Power Virtual Server offering, which was dubbed “Secure Automated Backup with Compass for IBM Power Virtual Server.”
Last week, the two partners announced an expansion of that product with a new product, dubbed “Secure Automated Backup with Compass for IBM Cloud.” The big difference between the two offerings is that the latter one supports not only all workloads running on IBM Cloud but also a variety of on-prem platforms and systems.
Specifically, Secure Automated Backup with Compass for IBM Cloud supports IBM i, Windows, Linux on x86, macOS, AIX, and Linux on Power running on Power, x86, and VMware environments. It also supports a variety of databases, including Db2, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB, among others. In addition to data living on the IBM Cloud, “Secure Automated Backup with Compass for IBM Cloud” also supports data living on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Alibaba Cloud, IBM says.
IBM says that “security is at the core of this new offering.” What that means is that Secure Automated Backup with Compass for IBM Cloud utilizes IBM’s cloud object storage offering, dubbed IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS), to encrypt data, defend against ransomware, prevent unauthorized access, and provide automated compliance, retention, and audit trails.
Secure Automated Backup with Compass for IBM Cloud is available now in the IBM Cloud catalog, which simplifies setup and billing. IBM claims that IBM Cloud is now used by 95 percent of the Fortune 500 and has more than 600,000 monthly active users.
“With this launch, customers can now safeguard workloads across IBM Cloud, other public clouds, and on‑premises data centers around the world – all through a single, simplified experience,” said Greg Tevis, Cobalt Iron’s vice president of strategy.
Cobalt Iron continues to sell its VTL offering for IBM i outside of the IBM Cloud. Customers can deploy the Compass Tape Gateway separately from IBM Cloud.
RELATED STORIES
Why The IBM i Market Needed Another VTL Option
