ETI-NET – BackBox was the highlight in ETI and HPE presentations where many new features were covered

Like many of you who participated in the first ever virtual this year’s NonStop Technical Boot Camp, it was a case of holding our breaths to see what might transpire. Would it attract a small crowd from the NonStop community or would it soar to record numbers? Would there be strong NonStop customer participation. Like many of you, we suspect, we were surprised when we saw the Sold Out message posted to the event web site noting, as it did, that there were now 2,000 registrations for the event. And yet, as the event drew near, ETI-NET held its collective breath.

Our major presentation was given on Tuesday morning: TBC20-073 – Introducing BackBox Secondary Storage – New Release 4.09 and this was a time for ETI-NET CTO, Fernand Lussier, to cover features included in the latest release of BackBox that would become available this month. Release 4.09 will include support of Data Deduplication (Dedup) and as Lussier began his presentation, he addressed this topic first explaining why you should consider “Dedup Storage” – yes, it lowers storage costs even as it improves performance when replicating to a disaster recovery site “since there’s far less data to transfer.”

Other topics covered in this presentation included updates on BackBox Virtual Tape Controller (VTC) – showcasing fault tolerance without additional complexity; parallelism with the performance gains that result and sharable VTC pairs that further enhance the ability for multiple hosts to share a VTC to better support a fault tolerant architecture external to NonStop. These updates are all part of BackBox Release 4.09 where testing has been ongoing for some time at a number of Beta sites.

BackBox VTC is part of the HPE product portfolio and was referenced in presentations apart from what ETI-NET gave and the focus given on the fault tolerant properties of BackBox VTC is an important message for all NonStop customers. The announcement by the NonStop product managers of a next generation of NonStop converged systems – the HPE NonStop NS8 X4 (a high-end NonStop system) and the HPE NonStop NS4 X4 (an entry-class NonStop system) – based on the latest Intel Xeon chips highlighted these systems compatibility with previous generation systems.

Among the many highlights of this product update was how all software would be compatible even as the functioning of storage and communication controllers remained unaffected by the change.  This fourth generation of NonStop converged systems could be best summarized as the HPE NonStop taking the next step in the journey that began with the support of the Intel x86 architecture where this upgrade focused the communities attention on better support for security embedded in silicon.  However, there is no lessening of importance in fault tolerance and this was a major reason why fault tolerance was given the emphasis during our presentation.

The second part of the presentation by Lussier focused on the integration by ETI-NET of QoreStor technology from Quest into the BackBox product suite. Available for both BackBox and virtual BackBox, QoreStor has many features beneficial to the NonStop customer. Apart from the already covered Dedup capabilities that come with QoreStor, NonStop customers will also benefit from being able to leverage QoreStor in other ways as well, including its replication capabilities, encryption and cloud archiving.

However, it is the support of secondary storage that may be of most interest of all as secondary storage covers all storage media not directly accessible by a system in the same way as is primary storage such as an internal disk. Often considered an enterprises permanent memory, this has become a topic of discussion among system architects considering the use of cloud-based storage and with BackBox / vBackBox together with QoreStor supporting this lower tier of storage will provide NonStop customers with a choice when it comes to secondary storage adoption.

At a time when so many conversations center around cloud usage even as questions arise as to what benefits clouds provide, it’s an undeniable fact that clouds have the flexibility to accommodate almost any amounts of data, inexpensively and safely, and giving BackBox the option to replicate to cloud data offerings will be a feature many NonStop customers will be giving it considerable attention.

In his presentation TBC20-082 Update on NonStop Back-Up Solutions, NonStop Product Manager Ozen Ercevik provided further updates on how the HPE NonStop team would be capitalizing on this latest release of BackBox / vBackBox. Ercevik made it clear that the HPE NonStop will bring out BackBox with QoreStor as a future feature. “The BackBox solution with QoreStor,” said Ercevik, “you can have QoreStor both on the physical BackBox VTC itself or you can install it in the cloud and make it part of virtual BackBox.” Either way, NonStop customers are going to have choices that really will help them address all the storage needs that they may have.

When ETI-NET first heard about the annual NonStop TBC becoming the NonStop All-Digital Experience we were unsure about how popular a format this might prove to be with NonStop customers. However as news reached us that 2,000 registrations had been received we were equally as surprised. Now that the event is over and the organizers have loaded all the presentations to the web we think that this format may continue well into the future. If as yet you haven’t replayed our video, and would like to do so, then simply follow this link –

https://vimeo.com/showcase/7776942/video/477367707

This latest NonStop TBC has wrapped up and there will be many of you looking at presentations you may have missed. After viewing the ETI-NET presentation or seeing reference to ETI-NET products in other HPE presentations, if you then have questions about BackBox and vBackBox, then don’t hesitate in giving us a call or sending us an email.

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

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