ETI-NET: Meeting the needs of backup and restore in today’s hybrid world

The NonStop TBC 2023 Conference is well and truly behind us. There will likely be many articles in this months’ issue of NonStop Insider that cover the conference, with an understanding that it is at gatherings of the NonStop community where a picture of the future of NonStop is portrayed. There can be no mistaking the continued support of NonStop systems coming from the NonStop user community and perhaps the best observation that was made was about the quality of participants this year – there were more senior members of the NonStop user community present than at previous TBC conferences.

ETI-NET has maintained a consistent presence at NonStop conferences for many decades. Whether our presence could be observed at regional gatherings or at the premier events in Europe and the Americas, our product portfolio is such that for many NonStop users, it is viewed as an integral component in their functioning NonStop deployment. When it comes to virtual tape support, the properties of the backup and restore capabilities and our willingness to address the ongoing dynamics of a constantly changing technology landscape have made ETI-NET synonymous with NonStop and its ability to keep processing, no matter what.

Fault tolerance and true 24 x 7 x forever operation doesn’t come without taking into consideration external environmental situations. The presence of NonStop within a modern data center means that NonStop is part of a hybrid IT world. An environment that has become more vulnerable than ever before. With as many discussions as there were at NonStop TBC 2023 it was hard to miss the many references to business continuity, business resilience and yes, cyber resilience. Bracket them all under the general heading of digital resilience and quickly you become aware that out of the box NonStop needs a lot of supporting infrastructure to be in place to deliver on the promise of permanent availability. Ask any CIO about the SLAs they have in place for mission critical applications and they will be only too willing to inform you that every second counts in any customer-facing environment.

ETI-NET’s foundation and premier product offering is BackBox^®. With its origins as a Virtual Tape Controlled (VTC) emulating tape devices while providing high-availability and disaster-recovery support for an entire data center of NonStop systems, BackBox has continued to be enhanced as industry requirements have grown. With the addition of integrated QoreStor^® software-defined primary backup storage, the BackBox with QoreStor solution advances NonStop data protection agility by delivering versatility, adaptation and seamless transformation for our NonStop customers.  Through QoreStor’s integrated object storage for Backup, BackBox expands NonStop operations secondary storage options while reducing storage footprint and costs. QoreStor facilitates the adoption of the most popular storage types, uniquely including cloud object storage like native object storage delivering numerous services capabilities.  QoreStor’s high integration means BackBox customers can gain more control, agility, cost savings and delivery options to protect their NonStop system data than ever before.

“ETI-NET has enjoyed a long partnership with the HPE NonStop team and with the cooperation extended to ETI-NET it has allowed us to continually enhance our product roadmap. Always evolving to meet changing requirements, BackBox has been at the forefront of ensuring every NonStop system can achieve backup and restore capabilities that satisfy any business need as it delivers on every negotiated SLA.”

Benoit Caron,
ETI -NET COO

This year our presence at the NonStop TBC 2023 Conference gave us the opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with the HPE NonStop team. New faces, new priorities and new logos always represent opportunities to converse with the NonStop team and cover the latest data protection and enhanced management features from ETI-NET. Offering solutions to a NonStop customers’ data needs with value pricing always gets these NonStop team members attention. BackBox with QoreStor has already gained interest with features like integrated storage control, deduplication, and 3-2-1-X best practice adherence, but with this conference, ETI-NET was able to work with HPE to deliver “System Build Snapshot” covering the complete bare metal restoration of the $SYSTEM.

As it is being done in cooperation with the NonStop team, it takes advantage of the BackBox “Stand Alone Load” feature to restore the NonStop $SYSTEM image.  In conjunction with integrated QoreStor this allows the NonStop customer to protect the $SYSTEM image aligning with their 3-2-1-x implementation best practice.  It is important to understand that the ETI-NET BackBox and QoreStor solution allows, the bare metal restoration of the NonStop $SYSTEM such that a NonStop customer can take advantage of any number of cloud or managed services offerings, where the “rented” infrastructure resources require no operating system or virtual infrastructure – including hypervisors – to be present. This makes this new feature an ideal option to those NonStop users looking for a more affordable approach to quickly restore system operation in the event of a disaster (physical or cyber) using proven backup infrastructure and methodologies that meet 3-2-1-x compliance requirements.

“As we continue to address NonStop user needs, from our partnership with Quest QoreStor® that delivers enhanced NonStop backup storage control and protection to where today we can offer support of bare metal backup and restoration, we are constantly tracking modern developments when it comes to the protection and restoration of all information that a business views as critical to its operations.

“We consider this a win-win-win situation where ETI-NET, HPE NonStop and the NonStop user all come out ahead of any form of disaster.”

Mike Mitsch
ETI-NET, Business Development Director
Management and Storage

More recently and a subject leading to many conversations at the NonStop TBC 2023 Conference is the work being done behind the scenes with Sentinel, ETI-NET’s NonStop monitoring product. Whether it is a performance issue to be identified and addressed or simply warnings of an impending diverge from an SLA requirement, Sentinel is a free-standing product offering from ETI-NET that modernizes NonStop operations management.  Sentinel’s ability to monitor other ETI-NET products with an emphasis on BackBox (ensuring protection of data) NonStop users can rest assured the oversight monitoring is configured and presented optimally by HPE and ETI-NET.

It was pleasing to see how quickly the NonStop user community came to understand the value that this capability will afford and already meaningful conversations with numerous NonStop users have commenced. This will be a major talking point in 2024, as we again turn to major NonStop events in the Americas, Europe and AsiaPac. As the premier provider of VTC, BackBox and now BackBox with QoreStor, including support for “System Build Snapshot”, it only seemed natural to turn to our own product portfolio where we could leverage the expertise in place in order to advance protection options while providing cost-effective oversight of all aspects of NonStop backup and restoration.

In the presentation we gave at NonStop TBC 2023 Conference, given the overall theme of the conference was Digital Resilience, ETI-NET gave an introduction as to how our product portfolio, working together backup and restore, the supports of the 3:2:1:x rule and integrated monitoring met and, in many respects, exceeded the security requirements with the enhancement to Sentinel and working with BackBox with QoreStor®. This was just one outcome from a synergistic product portfolio driven by roadmaps that addressed current NonStop user requirements.

Together with the HPE NonStop team, ETI-NET has become the go-to organization for addressing any external environmental situations potentially effecting the delivery of 24 x 7 x forever processing. These ETI-NET product offerings have stepped up to provide the integrity, safety and security every CIO looks for as they turn to NonStop for mission critical transaction processing. From the exchanges we enjoyed at the NonStop TBC 2023 conference it was quickly apparent that ETI-NET is advancing today’s market pursuits and for that the NonStop community enjoys a level of protection and agility that other solutions cannot match.

It’s truly a hybrid world where an outage may come from anywhere. Whatever type of resilience you are looking for, ETI-NET is best positioned to address. If you have missed our presentation or did not have the opportunity to meet with us at this recent conference, please feel free to reach out to the ETI-NET team through the use of the contact information, below.

Web – https://etinet.com/contact-us/

Phone – (514) 395-1200