New features
incorporated in version 2.05 of ETI-NET BackBox®
extend functionality and availability, responding to
customer input. BackBox provides a
powerful virtual tape robot solution for all HP NonStop
servers and allows
NonStop systems to use existing corporate storage
environments and physical tape resources.
At the HP Technology Forum & Expo
2008, Las Vegas, ETI-NET introduced our new BackBox
Express™
BackBox Express™ is especially packaged to meet the
needs of customers replacing end-of-life tape drives.
BackBox Express™ can be configured with an internal tape
drive permitting retrieval of Legacy archived NonStop tape
media, and can be cross-connected between K-series, S-series
and NS series hosts to enable use of virtual tape as a
system migration path. BackBox Express™ provides a solution for low-end
NonStop systems that cannot justify the entry level high
costs of other virtual tape products for NonStop systems. BackBox Express™ also provides a cost-effective
solution for the majority of NonStop systems that do not
require the complexity or costs of other virtual tape
systems.
Many NonStop systems exchange data
with IBM mainframes on a regular basis, such as handing
off end-of-day account data and receiving start-of-day data.
This is common among BASE24 installations.
Gateway2 uses the proven technology of ETI-NET’s
BackBox virtual tape product to permit NonStop applications
to write and read virtual tapes on an intermediate staging
storage area.
A similar technique is used to permit Mainframe applications
to write and read virtual tapes in that staging area.
ETI-NET’s BackBox product, including SCSI
and FC interfaces to NonStop hosts, has been tested and
certified for use on HP C-series blades at the HP’s
Cupertino Partner Technology Access Center (PTAC), in
conjunction with HP’s Solution Alliances Engineering group.
When implemented on HP C-class Blade
platforms, up to 8 BackBox VTCs can be implemented in a
C7000 (10U) enclosure or 4 VTCs in a C3000 (6U) enclosure,
each VTC with up to 4 SCSI or Fibre Channel connections to
NonStop host systems. This is an unprecedented density for
NonStop virtual tape products, providing up to 32 NonStop
host connections, with corresponding processing power and
storage back-end connectivity to ensure maximum throughput.
Why Blades for BackBox?
Implementation of BackBox hardware and software in a Blade
environment offers many advantages:
- Denser packaging, as well as integration of FC & Ethernet
switch infrastructures, reduces rack space requirements
significantly;
- Compute power can be selected by individual Blade, to
tailor it to the BackBox VTC throughput requirements;
- Enable packaging Enterprise Storage Management servers,
including clusters, in the same enclosure;
- Reduce significantly the number of interconnect cables
required, and thus potential points of failure;
- Higher degree of power supply and cooling redundancy than
in conventional servers;
- Intelligent cooling design reduces both power and data
center cooling requirements;
- HP’s Onboard Administrator, together with server and
infrastructure management software simplifies monitoring and
control of the servers.
ETI-NET announces new approach to DR for NonStop:
Virtual
tape replication with catalog re-creation
Finally physical tape can be eliminated from disaster
recovery operations, along with all of its costs and risks.
Based on BackBox, ETI-NET’s powerful virtual tape
subsystem for NonStop systems, and Data Domain’s data
de-duplication products, this new capability solves the
messy problems of movement of backup tape catalog metadata
as well as the tapes themselves.
ETI-NET Partners with Data Domain
Data de-duplication is one of the hottest topics in storage
management
and backup technologies today, and Data Domain is the
pre-eminent
supplier of products that embody it. ETI-NET has partnered
with Data
Domain to enable NonStop users to take advantage of this
techology,
reducing the need for tape and enabling new approaches to
DR.
What do you do
if you are a major wireless carrier with 2.6 TB of month-end
subscriber call records to transfer from your NonStop
systems to an IBM MVS back-office system, but only a 2 hour
window to do it? And you need full automation, assurance of
delivery integrity, fault tolerance, as well as
expandability for future growth?
Over 1 TByte/hour! ETI-NET's new BackHome/Ultra gives
NonStop
Integrity users the ability to backup their large TMF-protected
databases
extremely quickly, painlessly and often, enabling quick TMF
roll-forward
to restore to a point in time.
While EZX/BackBox has been able to migrate backup data to
EMC/Legato
NetWorker servers via a scripted NetWorker client, ETI-NET
announces
a new EZX/BackBox "conduit" mode for NetWorker. Instead of
staging
virtual tape images on BackBox disk and then migrating them
to a Networker
server, now the backup data can be passed directly to the
Networker
server via its API. More info to come.....
Another BackBox® Customer
Success
BackBox is the winning ticket
for Loto Quebec. When Loto Quebec went looking
for a Virtual Tape solution they select ETI-NET's
BackBox as the winning solution.
In preparation for the release
of HP NonStop Itanium machines and with the
cooperation of HP ETI-NET has tested their
current product base for certification on these
machines. Please follow the hyperlink for the
results.