ETI-NET BackBox H version now available!

In last month’s article we focused on RUG events – our own participation in RUG meetings as well as RUG presence being our favorite venue for interacting with customers, prospects and HPE. It is through attendance at RUG events that we hear what the NonStop community is doing with NonStop systems and just as importantly from a NonStop vendors’ perspective, what new products from NonStop are proving valuable to NonStop users as well as the how quickly new NonStop systems are finding homes within their data centers. You can quickly tell if HPE has produced a winning new product or feature if everyone is talking about it!

However, the flip side of learning will always be delivering. We learn a lot from the RUG events but we also have to deliver equally as exciting new products and features. Watchful as we always are of what our competition is doing as well as what HPE is providing, it’s always with a sense of relief when a new piece of hardware or even a new release of software is introduced and this month has been no exception. And this time, we have begun shipping our latest release of BackBox E – BackBox H!

With as much discussion as there has been about hybrid IT and the transformation of data centers with a collection of homogeneous technologies usually driven by just a single primary vendor to data centers with a mix of traditional IT alongside new-age private clouds. For many of our clients hybrid IT is very much in its infancy and yet, when you look at traditional IT, there are elements of hybrid IT visible almost everywhere you turn. Take storage products, for instance. There would be very few modern data centers where storage was not assembled as a resource and where the expectation that the systems present in the data center would each be able to access storage no matter the respective vendor’s systems’ characteristics. Standards bodies have now made sure that there are industry standard ways to access storage and this has changed the cost of storage in material ways – we now can deploy almost unlimited amounts of storage.

ETI-NET is in the business of supporting the backup of data to tape – virtual tape, that is. With NonStop resident software, an external hardware controller and connectivity options to all of the popular external storage providers, BackBox is ETI-NET’s most popular product and today it is installed almost everywhere there is a NonStop system deployed. Available directly from the HPE NonStop team, it addresses all the items that auditors and regulatory authorities mandate. Whether a customer is running the latest NonStop X system or even planning on running virtualized NonStop (vNS), traditional and virtualized systems can connect directly to BackBox or vBackBox and from there, to the preferred storage solution resident in the data center. So, what is new with this latest version of BackBox?

“The latest BackBox E and BackBox H versions have an updated user interface that simplifies the navigation and the configuration for the user and features new accessible functionalities, such as connection setting for virtualized NonStop.  With this new version, the physical BackBox can support the connection to the vNS and the  FC connections on the same VTC,” said ETI-NET COO, Sylvain Tétreault . “Moreover, the back-end has been improved for LARGEBLOCK transfer in order to ensure a faster and more reliable back-up/recovery process. Furthermore, all NonStop systems continue to be supported regardless of an enterprise’s choice of storage. Before introducing the LARGEBLOCK feature, the transfer max capacity was 52k block. Now, with LARGEBLOCK the transfer capacity increased up to 896 k buffer, which considerably improves the transfer time / speed / performance.”

Storage is hybrid already and as we transform from heterogeneous systems to true hybrid IT, storage options will change dramatically. Many NonStop users will venture into using private clouds for backup even as they embrace vNS for their mission critical processing needs – yes, data and business logic will likely move to clouds whenever auditors and regulatory authorities don’t object. We will likely hear more of this at upcoming RUG events and that is why you will continue to see us participating in events worldwide but already, ETI-NET is ensuring that with each new release of BackBox NonStop users have the right product for backup.

If you happen to see us as we participate in an event and would like to discuss your backup requirements, please don’t hesitate in coming to us with your requirements for virtual tape systems. And of course, we are open to take a call and to respond to an email so feel free to contact us at any time.

Said Hini
said.hini@etinet.com (514) 663-0501
http://etinet.com/