Why Fortra Partnered with FalconStor to Launch Continuity Care: A Validated Recovery Service for IBM i

October 26, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

With over 7,000 Power Systems customers, Fortra is one of the largest software conglomerates serving the IBM i and AIX communities and it is by far the largest supplier of systems software for Power Systems. The company is also a key development partner of Big Blue, having nine years ago taken over enhancements to Rational Developer for i, Backup, Recovery and Media Services (BRMS) on i, and PowerHA SystemMirror for i.

As such, Fortra is a perfect partner for FalconStor Software as it seeks to expand the use of its Habanero off-site data protection SaaS and its related Cloud Clean Room restoration environment that runs on IBM’s Power Virtual Server (PowerVS) cloud. And so, the two companies have come together so that Fortra can add a new service, called Continuity Care, to several other services it offers based on its own software tools.

To get some insight on how that service came to be and how the two partners are working together to create it, I sat down and had a chat with Tom Huntington, executive vice president of technical solutions at Fortra, and Ron Morita, chief technology officer at FalconStor.

Timothy Prickett Morgan: Let’s start with the obvious. Tell us why Fortra is offering the Continuity Care managed service for cybersecurity resilience and recovery validation. I am not sure that a lot of IBM i shops think of Fortra as a managed services provider, which it is. What is the context behind this launch?

Tom Huntington: First of all, yes, we do have other managed care services now. We have offered the Secure Care service for many years, this is where we monitor and manage IBM i partitions for customers for security. We look at their configuration, provide executive level reporting back to their team along with annual risk assessments. We have also been in the high availability space for quite a long time, and in the last two years, we started offering HA Care services.

The IBM i Marketplace study is really spearheading this Continuity Care service. Last year, for the first time, the number one top concern for customers were IBM i skills. Skills are not being developed fast enough with IBM i talent turning over or retiring. So, IT leaders on this platform realize they don’t have the skillset needed for backup and recovery. You have these situations that happen to people periodically, and maybe once a month they have to restore files from some form of media stored someplace. This is one thing driving it.

The fact that we had all the other Care services for HA and security, it just made sense to bring in backup and recovery as another service. Fortra has the two main tape management systems that exist in the marketplace, with both Robot SAVE and IBM Backup Recovery and Media Services. But we are not a hardware or infrastructure company, so we need a partner.

TPM: Ron, I assume that this is like an ideal partnership because it’d be hard to find a bigger distributor of software and services in the Power Systems market than Fortra. You have the Habanero service and the Cloud Clean Room to test the restoration of backups on PowerVS, and now you have the biggest independent software vendor focused on systems software in the Power Systems market as your partner.

Ron Morita: I think it’s really a match made in heaven for many reasons. One is that, as you say, they’re the largest ISV. They’ve got incredibly good customer intimacy. It’s very clear when we talk to Fortra that it understands its customers. Also, they have deep expertise in two areas. One is cybersecurity, which is a huge driver for the Cloud Clean Room, and offsite data protection, which is addressed with Habanero.

TPM: It is so clear how critical it is now to air gap your archives. It is dangerous out there, and it is getting more so with rogue AI agents. I mean, who knows what’s going to happen? So companies, all companies, have got to get this done.

Ron Morita: Exactly, they absolutely do. From the various market research from Fortra and elsewhere, we’ve seen that CIOs don’t feel confident in being able to restore. Historically, people thought about backups, and ensuring these were complete and successful, but they did not think about restore, which is really the goal. Backup is a means to the end. So bringing in the disaster recovery side, the cybersecurity, and the services side to augment the administrative skills of enterprises is a huge opportunity and a growing one. It’s only going to get more challenging for these CIOs to be able to have confidence in in their administrative skill set because the environment is changing so rapidly. Together, we have made a SaaS service that augments rather than replaces what they are doing. We don’t require rip and replace of current software or backup processes, we complement what’s there. The simplicity and the value is well defined.

Moreover, insurance companies are increasingly requiring validation of backups for compliance, and this enables customers to meet that requirement. So that that’s another nice piece of it.

TPM: I think that for a lot of smaller P05 or P10 shops, they have not been as enthusiastic about moving their backups to the cloud as I would like. So it’s obvious to me that this pairing allows for you both to tackle those customers. But I want to also make it clear that I think every shop needs to do this. The biggest shops in the world need to air gap a copy of their data and to validate recovery regularly. That’s separate from HA recovery of databases and applications. I think this Continuity Care service is for everybody.

Ron Morita: Well said. I mean that’s really it. You know, when it comes down to it, it’s every industry, it’s every customer with all the potential risks that are out there from cyberthreats, AI, and of course natural disasters. And unfortunately there are internal exposures too, both unintended like through application updates, or intended through bad actors.

Tom Huntington: The other thing of value here is the third vendor involved: IBM. We’re using IBM PowerVS for this. IBM obviously has a pretty good reputation with their customers as being a leading technology company, and highly reliable. We’re leveraging IBM PowerVS, spinning up partitions in the cloud, to meet this market’s needs.

Fortra will start by working with the customer on site to verify that their backup and recovery rules are good. If you’re using Robot SAVE or BRMS, we can look at the recovery reports, and understand those. We have experts that understand what a good backup is and what a bad backup is. Once this is established, then we connect up and replicate data to the FalconStor technology in PowerVS, and that’s where, as Ron talks about, we can create immutable backups that are basically kept for as long as somebody needs them for audit reasons: seven years, 10 years down the road.

TPM: And that’s using IBM Cloud Object Storage, right?

Tom Huntington: Correct. We use IBM Cloud Object Storage, and then we spin up the partition in the cloud. We connect the VTL to that newly created partition for the customer and restore the data for them. They are then given access to that data to be able to do their tests to verify that the data is theirs and that they can actually use it.

People always talk about backups, backups, backups. That’s all I’ve heard my whole career, too. But the whole restore aspect is what matters, and this puts the easy button on restore. Customers don’t have to worry about that aspect of it.

TPM: As I understand it there are three different versions of this service: Basic, Standard, and Plus. What are the differences between the tiers?

Tom Huntington: We start out with Basic, where they get an appliance on site that gets configured to talk to BRMS, Robot SAVE, or SAVE 21, and that data is then replicated to IBM PowerVS. You have replication from on-site to the cloud. It’s encrypted, and you can even mark those for immutable backups if you want. We also do a basic review of your BRMS rules, and Robot SAVE rules, to make sure that they’re correct. The service is from Fortra, the on-prem appliance and clean room are coming from FalconStor, and obviously PowerVS is IBM.

Then a step further, with Standard, we’re going to restore your system annually, making sure that you can have an annual recovery validation, and then the next tier up, Plus, we do it quarterly for the customer. The frequency just depends upon the industry or individual organizational needs. Some people need it for industry reasons on a quarterly basis. Others need it on an annual basis.

TPM: What’s the cost of a failure? What’s the cost of not being able to restore when you need to?

Tom Huntington: If you look at all the numbers, it varies greatly. In some cases, it can be millions of dollars an hour. You would think most big customers, the big Fortune 100s, have this covered, but even they are looking for simpler solutions in this space, and could definitely find value from having industry experts like Fortra and FalconStor working side by side with them, to validate recovery of their environments. Now let’s not forget, there’s a lot of people still doing tape backups.

TPM: That’s what I’m saying, right? I’m not against tape. Do it. Keep it local. Put it in the trunk of your car. It’s not the worst thing in the world, right? But that’s not the same thing as having something nobody can get to.

Ron Morita: That’s right.

TPM: Ron, what do you think? What’s the relative value here?

Ron Morita: One of the biggest drivers for a service like this, as Tom said, is business risk. If your environment goes down, and the cost is in millions, you’ve got to be able to have a data protection solution which solves for this.

You’ve raised a really important point, Timothy. It appeals to the small shops, but there’s a value proposition for the large shops, too. They may be doing backup, HA, and replication between two sites, but the challenge with cyber threats is those are the targets for the attackers. When one is attacked, the damage gets replicated to the other. You have to have an external location. Being able to have this type of configuration for large enterprises where there’s essentially a vault of your backups away from your datacenters is a huge business value. So that would be the first part, and what’s interesting here is that cyber protection is not typically part of the IT budget. It’s a CIO and CEO business impact decision. It’s a board-level decision, and so the funds that are going for that type of protection are a business risk expense versus an operational IT expense.

TPM: Does that make it easier or harder to get the budget for it? It should make it easier, right?

Ron Morita: I think it makes it much easier because the business case is so compelling. There are administrators who can get a backup to a different site, but we’ve observed for years now – and this is what motivated us to create Habanero – that getting data to the cloud is kind of tough, and getting it back is even tougher.

TPM: A restore is complex and can take forever. . . .

Ron Morita: Exactly. Being able to have an on-prem appliance that deduplicates and accelerates the transfer of data up into the cloud is critical. Being able to restore it quickly and on demand is also huge.

Think about it: What are the alternatives? Getting another rack of equipment because you don’t want to do it with your production systems? The clean room is so much easier and less costly. So instead of taking on the burden of the capital expense of racks of new hardware just for testing, you can send it offsite into our clean room, use it for three to four days, and then have it shut down.

Tom Huntington: Think about what has been going on in the industry, and I don’t know how many customers do this, but there are still recovery services providers out there where customers go to a facility and practice restoring their systems. With Continuity Care, they don’t have the expense of travel and the days out of the office, and they don’t have the expense of the other datacenter. We do the hard part. We get the data restored for them in the cloud. And to bring up another point, technically – and we’ve done testing along these lines – we could actually bring data back from the cloud too, so that the data that’s replicated up to the cloud can actually be restored back on premises.

TPM: Well, it has to come back because if there’s a disaster in the datacenter, you’re going to restore to it eventually. Nobody that I know wants to move their IBM i stuff into the cloud, but they’re happy to have replicated systems in the cloud.. And you only use it when you need to and you turn it off when you don’t – and that’s the beauty of it.

Ron Morita: We saw this in the early years of cloud adoption, where it was used for test/dev, which took advantage of that sort of on-demand, bursty compute. And we’re leveraging that also with the clean room – it’s really simple and on demand as opposed to continuous. Moreover, setting up a repository in the cloud is not easy. With a managed service, the physical appliance on prem is managed, the network connectivity to the cloud is managed, the vault itself is managed, and then Fortra does the testing on top of that. I think of it as a layer cake, and the Fortra service is at the top – it’s really the frosting on the cake.

TPM: Last question: Where is this Continuity Care service available? Are there any latency or bandwidth issues that make this not a global offering yet? Tom, that’s for you because it’s your service.

Tom Huntington: We can do it for anybody anywhere because it’s all virtual, except for the on-site appliance from FalconStor, and we’ve proven that we can replicate quite a bit of data across just an Internet connection, and that’s available around the globe. IBM has a lot of global datacenters for PowerVS.

TPM: That’s what I’m saying. IBM has PowerVS in the Americas, in Europe, and in Asia/Pacific. The point is, this care service is not just in one IBM datacenter right now and expanding later.

Ron Morita: They can be instantiated at any IBM PowerVS datacenter on demand. Customers can have their data in the same region and have low latency transfer.

I think a key piece here is that FalconStor understands the infrastructure really well, understands PowerVS and Cloud Object Storage really well, and developed this Cloud Clean Room. And so we have the enabling foundation for this. But the gap that we had was the services that tie directly into BRMS or Robot SAVE and the knowledge there. That’s not our expertise, and that’s where Fortra comes in. So it’s just a nice fit between the two.

Tom Huntington: One last thing: We can also layer on antivirus and malware protection. We can double protect this environment as we bring it up in the cloud.

TPM: Here’s the way I see it. Every IBM i shop has backups. Very few of them can say with a straight face that they know those backups will restore, and restore fast, after something or someone has gone after their systems. That’s the gap. The skills are thinning out, the attacks are getting nastier, and now we have AI agents to worry about, too. The insurance companies want proof, and an hour of downtime can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars, or millions for the big shops. Replicating between two datacenters doesn’t get you out of it, either, because whatever hits one hits the other.

What I like about Continuity Care is that nobody had to pretend to be something they aren’t. FalconStor brings the plumbing: the Habanero appliance, the immutable vault in IBM Cloud Object Storage, and the Cloud Clean Room on PowerVS. Fortra brings the people who know BRMS and Robot SAVE cold and can tell a good backup from a bad one. And IBM brings the cloud. You don’t rip anything out, you don’t buy a second rack of iron just to test on, and you don’t fly anybody off to a recovery center. You get an air-gapped copy of your data, and depending on the tier, proof once a year or once a quarter, that you can actually get your business back. Backups are a means to an end, as Ron says, and restore is the end. This puts the two together, and frankly, every shop, big or small, should be doing it.

This content was sponsored by FalconStor Software.

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