Dan2021. What an interesting year. With the world turned upside down by a pandemic that seemingly had its sights set on...
ETI-NET – Bringing access to cloud resources a reality for the NonStop community.
ETI-NET
Dan
HPE continues to pursue its vision of becoming the world’s leading edge to cloud platform as a service company. Having identified this as its preeminent goal it’s become increasingly clear that the cloud, indeed what industry also references as the core, implies that enterprise IT will turn more frequently to the cloud as a resource. For the NonStop community, this means that enterprise IT will likely turn to the cloud first as a place to store data and whether it’s archival in nature or simply part of a business continuity plan, the elasticity of storage that clouds provide becomes hard to ignore.
According to an October 26, 2020 Gartner article, Cloud shift impacts all IT markets, the analysts make it very clear that:
By 2024, more than 45% of IT spending on system infrastructure, infrastructure software, application software and business process outsourcing will shift from traditional solutions to cloud. This evolution makes cloud computing one of the most continually disruptive forces in IT markets since the early days of the digital age.
Organizations are increasingly using cloud services for new initiatives or to replace existing systems, meaning that spending on traditional IT solutions is being reallocated to cloud. The result is what Gartner calls cloud shift, and it is happening more often due to a growing preference for “cloud-first.”
In 2020 ETI-NET announced that it would be leveraging the QoreStor™ (QS) product offering from Quest. The decision to partner is in anticipation that NonStop customers will be among the many IT organizations that embrace a “cloud-first” preference, particularly when it comes to storing data. The best way to view QS is as a “software-defined platform for secure cloud storage, deduplication and replication.” The relationship between ETI-NET and Quest was driven by the recognition that a partnership would allow much faster time to market for ETI-NET solutions addressing access to clouds. QS is a proven product that has attracted considerable attention in the marketplace with its hardware and software agnostic solution and its support of virtually any backup software.
“We anticipate that our NonStop customers will be able to improve backup efficiency, reduce storage requirements and costs,” said ETI-NET COO, Sylvain Tétreault. “We also are anticipating that with support for content-aware, variable block deduplication, replicating faster and safer to Disaster / Recovery (DR) sites along with providing access to the cloud for data archiving, ETI-NET will be able to satisfy the growing demands of our NonStop customers.”
In addition to simply pursuing the support of cloud storage as a target backup resource, ETI-NET will also be supporting the all-important deduplication capabilities as supported by QS:
BackBox Dedupe Software Powered by QoreStor™ is a software-defined secondary storage platform that provides various options, such as deduplication, replication, encryption, and cloud tiering. With this solution, the platform reduces storage requirements and costs, by replicating fast and secure to another BackBox VTC (through BackBox Dedupe) or to the cloud. By leveraging the cloud service capabilities for archiving and disaster recovery, BackBoxTM takes advantage of the simplicity, security, and redundancy of any cloud platform.
The key to the ETI-NET product offering is BackBox (BB). “With BB we have the premier backup solution for NonStop customers and aligning with Quest simply means that one more backup product would become part of the supported backup options available to all QS users. “We can see that NonStop users will be able to readily archive data critical to the business within the cloud,” said Tétreault. “We are one of the very first NonStop vendors to offer products that integrate NonStop with popular cloud offerings.”
Tétreault then said that “as of 2021, Beta Testing of BB / QS is well under way and it’s looking very good based on the customer feedback already received.” For now, testing is focused simply on the integration and the performance of the BB storing to QS data storage. “This will be followed shortly with additional testing as we capitalize on the deduplication capabilities afforded by QS before then testing our ability to archive in the cloud with QS,” explained Tétreault. But already we have heard enough from the customer that has made us very excited over the prospects for BB meeting all the needs of NonStop customers when it comes to leveraging clouds.
The BB / QS product offering has addressed the basics from the customer perspective and now “is in the process of selecting what they want to move from NonStop to the cloud. They are also testing how QS will do it automatically and keep track of it in case you need to restore it.” With what we have seen to date and the experience of the customer during the beta testing, we have plans in place to release BB / QS to everyone in the NonStop community very soon. Should you have any questions about our BB / QS product offering or simply would like more information about BB, don’t hesitate giving us a call or sending us an email.
Said Hini
said.hini@etinet.com (514) 663-0501
