FalconStor Creates Cloud Clean Room To Prove Backup Recoveries Work

July 13, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is a bit sad to say this, but a lot of IBM i shops are still relying on tapes to backup their system software as well as their application software and the databases that drive them. There is nothing wrong with tape, and it makes sense to do offsite backups to tape and park them in Iron Mountain or some other facility. But the problem is that recovering from tape is a nightmare and no one knows if the recovery is going to work until the bad day when something goes wrong – through human error or hacking or a system failure – and they have to find out the hard way.

Backup and recovery technologies have come a long way in the era of cloud computing, and there are still plenty of shops that either cannot afford high availability clustering software for maximum resilience or who correctly feel that a local HA cluster does not solve the backup and recovery issue. These days, with all of the cybersecurity threats that every company connected to the Internet faces, having a backup that you know – beyond a shadow of a doubt – can be restored is critical.

FalconStor, the creator of the StorSafe virtual tape library (VTL) software that runs on just about every platform out there in the commercial datacenter space, took the first step in ensuring proper and managed backup services to the cloud for IBM i shops with its Habanero offsite data protection service, launched back in January.

With Habanero, FalconStor has an on premises gateway called Ignite that runs on X86 or Power servers natively or on virtual machines on these platforms that can do rapid recovery from a backup image for the production IBM i servers from IBM’s Cloud Object Storage, which is available at more than 60 IBM Cloud datacenters worldwide. Another feature called Blaze, which is based on portions of the StorSafe stack, FalconStor has created an ultrafast transport layer that can backup and restore data from that cloudy object storage around 20X faster than alternative methods. FalconStor has experts, which it called the Habanero Operations Team, who manage the backup and restore service for customers.

With the Cloud Clean Room add-on service from FalconStor, the company is taking backup and recovery one step further and spins up virtual IBM i images on the Power Virtual Server (PowerVS) portion of the IBM Cloud, which has Power Systems servers that support IBM i, AIX, and Linux running on Power10 and Power11 servers. These are not just ordinary PowerVS logical partitions, but ones that have been enhanced by what FalconStor calls the Zero Trust Secure Enclave, which is a persistent, hardened LPAR that can be created and destroyed as necessary to test a recovery from a backup done through the Habanero service.

“If you are an on-prem customer,” Ron Morita, chief technology officer at FalconStor, tells The Four Hundred, “you actually have to buy additional servers or you have to have additional compute if you are going to run recovery tests on production servers, which you don’t really want to do when running some of these DR tests. You want to keep the recovery tests isolated, and that is, quite frankly, why people don’t do it. It’s very expensive. It’s very difficult. So creating a clean room in the cloud that is isolated and secure, and has access to the resources on demand means that you don’t have to procure hardware in advance and have it sitting idle when you’re not doing the DR test or having an actual recovery event. You can clean it, scan it, restore it, and once you know that it’s good, you can save it back into immutable storage or you can restore it back to production.”

The Zero Trust Secure Enclave is the special sauce in the Cloud Clean Room service, and it is an extra layer of security around the LPARs that comprise the enclave running on the PowerVS cloud that, instead of providing broad access to IBM i resources through network connections that provides point to point connections between the Habanero service and the LPAR such that these are the only services that are authorized for access to the LPAR.

“We have locked down all of the entry points into the virtual system, and so the resources that you can see during validation are highly contained,” says Morita. “It is secure, but accessible. The network layer underlying the clean room has a patent pending, and it remains persistent even when an LPAR is destroyed after a test, and that means you, as a customer, do not have to figure out networking services on the PowerVS cloud. This is something that customers do not want to do.”

The Cloud Clean Room also does one other important thing that the system auditors want to see. It generates audit documentation that meets DORA, FFIEC, and PCI-DSS regulatory requirements so companies can prove that they can recover from hack attacks, system failures, human error, and anything else that might take a system out.

This Cloud Clean Room service should help IBM i shops close the gap between their concerns about cybersecurity and restores from backup. According to data compiled by HyperFRAME Research in its State of Enterprise Infrastructure & Operations report for the first half of 2026, which you can obtain here, 91 percent of the companies it surveyed for its report said they are prioritizing “cyber resilience,” with immutable storage and ransomware recovery driving storage sales, but only 30 percent of these same companies have confidence that their recoveries will work even as almost all of them have recovery plans.

It is far better to know than to hope or to guess.

The Cloud Clean Room service is available now and has an incremental price, based on the size and complexity of the LPARs being tested, over the cost of the Habanero service.

With the Habanero service, FalconStor sells 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.

One last thing: FalconStor is participating in a webinar with Fortra on July 28 about the future of the IBM i platform, and Todd Brooks, the chief executive officer at FalconStor, will participate and will almost certainly talk more about Habanero and Cloud Clean Room. You can register for the webinar at this link.

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