LaserVault Archives

LaserVault Goes iSCSI With Virtual Tape Library

September 14, 2026 Alex Woodie

LaserVault, the popular virtual tape library (VTL) for IBM i environments from Electronic Storage Corp., has gained support for iSCSI, giving customers more connectivity options beyond Fibre Channel and SAS connections. The new iSCSI support will be particularly useful for customers running the LaserVault ViTL offering in the cloud.

LaserVault ViTL is a disk-based backup solution that emulates LTO drives in IBM i and open systems environments. Customers have typically plugged the LaserVault device – either the appliance sold by Electronic Storage Corp. or the ViTL software running on an X86 server – into the IBM i server using those …
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LaserVault Adds Multi-Path Support To ViTL

September 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

LaserVault is shipping a new release of its virtual tape library software that is likely to find a warm reception among customers who need different retention periods for their IBM i backups. By enabling ViTL 4.0 to support multiple storage paths to backend storage appliances, it’s allowing customers to reduce the amount of data they store and giving them an overall more efficient backup environment.

ViTL is the name of LaserVault’s flagship virtual tape library (VLT) for IBM i, which the company (also known as known as Electronic Storage Corp) launched back in 2018. The product, which emulates …
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IBM i Community Shares 2024 Predictions

January 15, 2024 Alex Woodie

Spaceship Earth has completed another trip around the Sun, which means one thing: Time for 2024 IBM i predictions! Hopefully you enjoy this year’s predictions, which seem to sport a good mixture of optimism and realism.

The future for IBM i is wide open – open source, that is, says Liam Allan, the creator of Code for IBM i and a software developer for IBM i.

“My prediction is pretty simple. Businesses will continue to invest in themselves through the power of open source,” Allan says. “Whether it be using dev tools, open source runtimes like Node.js, or even newer …
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Data De-Dupe Gives VTL Customers More Options

March 29, 2023 Alex Woodie

When your IBM i backup data is 10x smaller, the backups complete more quickly and the local storage requirements are smaller. But that’s just the beginning of the savings for customers of LaserVault, which added a new data de-duplication feature to its virtual tape library (VTL) last year.

LaserVault has been providing IBM i backup solutions for many decades, and launched its line of VTL solutions in 2006. Customers can get ViTL, as the VTL is called, as a Fibre Channel- or SAS-connected backup appliance (LaserVault partners with Supermicro for hardware) or as shrink-wrapped software that customers can run on …
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Give Me A Fulcrum And A Lever Long Enough, And I Can Move Your Data

July 13, 2022 Brad Jensen

An old adage about the power of mechanics and physics illustrates perfectly how we feel about virtual tape libraries, and not just the ones made by us, but about other VTL wares out there in the field: Give me a fulcrum and a lever long enough and I can move the world.

We know that there are other good VTL tools out there, and it is good because the competition keeps us all honest. The important thing is that using VTL brings IT organizations out of the Stone Age of managing data archives and backups.

First off, if you are …
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In The IBM i Trenches With: LaserVault

March 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

When somebody says they have been doing the same job for three or four decades, that is a big deal in the 21^st century because that kind of long-term employment is just not something anyone counts on. In the OS/400 and IBM i market, such constancy and longevity is, well, normal. Unremarkable. Expected. Good.

So it is with Brad Jensen, the founder and chief executive officer of Electronic Storage Corporation, a company that is perhaps best known for its LaserVault virtual tape library software, but since the company was founded in 1989 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it …
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LaserVault Gears Up for ProtecTIER Migrations

November 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

ProtecTIER customers that are on the hunt for a new VTL system following IBM’s decision to end support for the product have a number of options available to them. For IBM i shops that are concerned about the speed of their backups, they may want to check out the ViTL offering from LaserVault, a longtime IBM i solution provider.

Speed is one of the big benefits that ViTL brings to the IBM i backup arena, says Rick Wilson, the vice president of sales and solutions for LaserVault, which is based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

“We’re not restricted by the size …
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LaserVault Goes iSCSI With Virtual Tape Library

LaserVault Adds Multi-Path Support To ViTL

IBM i Community Shares 2024 Predictions

Data De-Dupe Gives VTL Customers More Options

Give Me A Fulcrum And A Lever Long Enough, And I Can Move Your Data

In The IBM i Trenches With: LaserVault

LaserVault Gears Up for ProtecTIER Migrations

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search