• M81 Speeds Backups with Flash for i

  February 3, 2021 Alex Woodie

  M81, a French independent software vendor (ISV) that develops IBM i software, recently announced a new release of Flash for i, a utility that uses IBM FlashCopy and EMC SnapShot technology to clone an IBM i disk volume in just two minutes. With version 4.0 out the door and a new partnership with an American company, M81 is looking to expands its operations in the United States.

  Flash for i is an innovative utility designed to provide an IBM i-centric way to manage the FlashCopy and Snapshot commands that IBM and Dell EMC bring to the table with their enterprise …

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• Don’t Count Tape Out Just Yet, ESG Report Says

  November 18, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Public cloud and disk-based backup systems are growing in popularity. But when it comes to keeping up with the explosion in data backup and archive volumes, organizations still are relying on tape to deliver the goods, according to a new report from the Enterprise Strategy Group.

  For Enterprise Strategy Group’s “2020 Tape Landscape” report, which it produced on behalf of the LTO Program, ESG surveyed more than 300 IT professionals from American and Canadian organizations to get a feel for their data protection requirements, with a focus on backup and archive.

  The analyst group determined that the average …

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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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• FalconStor Offers ProtecTIER Migration Deal to IBM i Shops

  October 28, 2020 Alex Woodie

  FalconStor Software is ramping up a new program to help IBM i shops migrate away from their IBM ProtecTIER virtual tape library (VTL) devices, which IBM has killed. The migration program essentially provides an extra 12 months of support for ProtecTIER devices for $999 per month, giving IBM i shops more time to make the switch to FalconStor’s own StorSafe offering.

  On February 13, 2018, IBM announced a statement of direction to cease support for various ProtecTIER hardware devices and the software that runs on them. IBM’s plan called for it to stop selling the devices in in June 2018, …

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• Cobalt Iron Supports Multiple LPARs with VTL

  July 22, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops will be able to back up multiple LPARs to an individual virtual tape library (VTL) from Cobalt Iron, the company announced recently. The new capability overcomes a limitation that has existed since the company started to support IBM i with its data protection service a couple of years ago.

  Cobalt Iron is a Lawrence, Kansas-based provider of enterprise data protection services. The company’s flagship offering, called Compass, provides backup, recovery, and related services for or all major computer platforms, including servers running on-prem, virtualized environments, and systems and applications running in clouds.

  Some of Cobalt Iron’s customers …

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• Sharing Tape Libraries Across Partitions Without VIOS

  May 4, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops have a love-hate relationship when it comes to the Virtual I/O Server, or VIOS. With the latest IBM i Technology Refresh, IBM is giving the anti-VIOS group a feature they have been requesting: the capability to easily share a tape library among multiple logical partitions, or LPARs without involving VIOS, SANs, or multiple adapters.

  IBM is calling the new feature “IBM i Virtualization for Tape Libraries,” and it’s based on RFE (request for enhancement) number 127631. While the words “tape libraries” and “virtualization” are in there, this is not a virtual tape library (VTL) solution. That already …

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• The Cloud Breathes New Life Into Managed Service Providers

  November 6, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a number of hotbeds of technology in the IBM midrange – Rochester, Toronto, Atlanta, and Austin are the biggies – and there is a very large number of business partners who have been helping customers try to figure out each step in the advancing progression of technologies that have come out of Big Blue and its partners for decades.

  The business partners tend to cluster around the hotbeds, as you might imagine, and we are pleased that after all of these years, there are still a lot of IBM i partners out there who do everything from help …

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• What’s the State of Your Backup?

  March 27, 2019 Alex Woodie

  If you’re like most IT professionals, you scarcely noticed that this Sunday, March 31, is World Backup Day. But now that you do know, you’re going to immediately do all you can to ensure that your company’s most valuable asset – its data – is sufficiently protected from the powers of destruction. The next question is: What does that mean for your IBM i server?

  As anybody who has ever lost an important document, database, or set of files knows, losing stuff hurts. And the more one loses, the more it hurts. That’s why it’s so critical to ensure that …

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• Cobalt Iron Targets IBM i with New VTL Offering

  November 14, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Cobalt Iron yesterday unveiled a new analytics-infused virtual tape library (VTL) solution that it says will optimize and bring IBM i backup and recovery operations into sync with the rest of the enterprise. The offering lets IBM i users back up their data to anywhere – including on-premise and the cloud backups, with automated replication in between — but without giving up IBM i-specific features delivered through existing tools like BRMS and native commands.

  Richard Spurlock founded Cobalt Iron five years ago with a plan to modernize backup and recovery. He saw that enterprises were spending too much time and …

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• LaserVault Puts the ‘i’ in VTL

  May 2, 2018 Alex Woodie

  LaserVault is rolling out a new virtual tape library (VTL) offering that could interest IBM i shops who are looking to get away from physical tape. Dubbed ViTL, the offering emulates an IBM LTO tape library, and thanks to integration with BRMS and HelpSystems‘ Robot Save, can provide the “set it and forget it” level of automation that IBM i shops expect from enterprise storage, the company says.

  LaserVault, which is also known as Electronic Storage Corp., is no newbie when it comes to virtualizing tape products. In 2006, the Tulsa, Oklahoma, company debuted LaserVault Backup to provide customers …

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