2021. What an interesting year. With the world turned upside down by a pandemic that seemingly had its sights set on...
ETI-NET enjoys strong partnership with HPE
ETI-NET enjoys a good relationship with HPE and is ready to support virtual tape for any mix of traditional and virtual NonStop systems today!
ETI-NET
DanThis year’s HPE Discover was heavy on content at both ends of the spectrum – Edge and Clouds. HPE executives went to great pains to describe the efforts HPE is making to bring the right Edge solutions to market even as they proposed that high-end, scale up, systems would be leveraging The Machine. In so doing, they recognized just how important a role data would play in helping business succeed in a world where Big Data, Data Analytics, AI and Deep Learning / Machine Learning all play a role. And two things became very clear – losing data, no matter how trivial it may appear at the time, is not an option and partnerships will be important when it comes to bringing products to market.
But here’s the thing; when you look at data in today’s world of on-prem systems cooperating with clouds, it’s always on the move and whether it’s data replication for backup to meet short term needs or simply for archival purposes, storage hierarchies exist for a reason and despite the focus on memory-driven compute having an impact on data centers it will not be the sole architecture present in the data center and traditional data backup requirements will remain an important consideration for any business.
HPE has looked to ETI-NET for many years now to provide NonStop users with cost-effective options when it comes to support for tape – still the go-to option for many enterprises. Not traditional tape drives but rather, turning to virtual tape drives. With the ETI-NET BackBox that HPE has been selling for many years, NonStop customers can leverage one or more external controllers that emulate tape devices (up to8 per port) via NonStop resident software that requires no modifications to any HPE NonStop utilities or catalogues. With such a transparent implementation paradigm, NonStop customers can meet the needs of the business without a need to resort to technologies that, for the most part, aren’t supported on NonStop anyway.
The partnership between HPE and ETI-NET ensures NonStop development remains focused on crucial middleware and infrastructure software important for the NonStop users leaving the efforts of implementing a virtual tape to the ETINET. NonStop SQL has been the subject of considerable investment by HPE as has the NonStop kernel itself. Now capable of running on the x86 architecture as is supported today by the NonStop X family of systems, it has moved deeper into the data center as it has been upgraded to run virtually – virtualized NonStop workloads can run anywhere there are x86 servers and where converged Ethernet is present making it possible for today’s NonStop users to run in on-prem server farms and private clouds with options to follow that will support of these virtualized NonStop workloads running on public clouds. To meet this need, BackBox can now be run as virtualized BackBox (vBackBox) and the partnership with HPE continues as the data center evolves to look more and more like clouds we are familiar with in the public arena.
“As for right now, when it comes to traditional NonStop, we don’t see a rush to clouds but rather a slow and normal evolution. When it comes to our work with HPE, then it will most likely continue to involve integrating BackBox with traditional storage options as well as with HPE StoreOnce Dedupe capable products, or even theHPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage,” said ETI-NET COO, Sylvain Tétreault. “While we expect to be getting requests this year for vBackBox, we have a project with HPE to move the BackBox Virtual Tape Controller (VTC) to the new HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 Server that should be completed sometime next year.”
There are many conversations under way with customers and prospects over the many options of running NonStop and ETI-NET together with HPE is working to better educate the NonStop base. To this end, ETI-NET is stepping up its presence and participation in user events worldwide and this July we will be joining HPE for events in Taiwan and South Korea as the AsiaPac / Japan has become a very important market for ETI-NET. However, no matter where you see us make sure you stop by to say Hi! and, of course, if you have any questions about BackBox or vBackBox or our plans for virtual tape going forward, don’t hesitate to ask. And if you miss us at any of these events, you can always email us or give us a call – we would be only too happy to respond to any questions you may have.