ETI-NET ready for clouds – BackBox in the cloud now a reality

HPE Discover Virtual Experience dominated conversations among the HPE community. It was the first time that HPE’s annual big-tent event went virtual and it’s one visible impact of the global pandemic that’s inescapable. Will it develop traction sufficient to see repetition in the future? Is it an omen of events to come? It’s early days, but even the staunchest of HPE NonStop users recognize that the flow-on effect of a virtual event is hard to ignore – replays of all keynote sessions together with technology and product updates by those directly involved certainly is valuable.

We have been in conversations and email exchanges with many of you and have talked with those who joined the event from their desks. Coming just after the first year of a three year program and following a major pivot to software and services, HPE was clearly delivering on its vision Edge-to-Core provided as a service as well as on capitalizing the cloud experience going as far as to note that this cloud experience could be leverage within traditional data centers.  Following the event, HPE CEO Antonio Neri tweeted:

“Last week we launched #HPEDiscover with incredible results. Our customers understand of our progress to become an as-a-service company and our capabilities to deliver the cloud experience everywhere. I am so tremendously proud of our @HPE team. #WeAreHPE”

In last month’s article, we inquired as to whether clouds were in your future. Furthermore, as IT professional we also asked whether you could see clouds floating just above your technology horizon? Do you believe they continue to be just out of reach, we wrote? This was neither accidental nor without purpose as working with our partner HPE, the interest in clouds has certainly picked up of late. Even the most ardent support of NonStop for mission critical applications is seeing how productivity across the data center improves with cloud access.

The introduction of virtual NonStop with its ability to run on hypervisors including VMware was just the first step the NonStop team took toward ensuring there would be customer benefits from running NonStop inside a cloud. Not surprising to ETI-NET as we have known for some time that CEO Neri had mandated support of clouds everywhere. “HPE can use BackBox in its cloud to offer backup for its NonStop,” said ETI-NET COO, Sylvain Tétreault.

“And this is just the start as we are working with NonStop users planning on leveraging the elasticity that clouds provide. With our new BackBox / QoreStor integration, the NonStop users can readily archive data critical to the business within the cloud,” said Tétreault.  “Archiving historical data to a cloud provider like Azure or AWS is one option, but so too is looking to clouds as a resource supporting the backup of data that otherwise may be transmitted to other, less real-time accessible media.”

Our need to back-up data will always be with us given business, association and government mandates. Even for systems like NonStop focused on support of mission-critical applications, there are requirements to backup and ultimately archive all data considered sensitive by the business. This is fundamental to what ETI-NET first built BackBox and why today it continues to be enhanced to meet the needs of modern data centers. Clouds will be everywhere and the cloudless world predicted by HPE will in all likelihood come about as we see clouds become ubiquitous, present in the smallest server to the largest data center.

As for the status of our cooperative development program with Quest in support of BackBox / Qorestor integration, we are able to advise the NonStop community that we have finalized the development of the required connectivity, integration and planning of a Beta test with one of our customers that will start soon and continue through the summer. Of course, “we will be looking to promote the take up of BackBox with Qorestor at upcoming major user events, with the 2020 NonStop Technical Boot Camp the likely venue, where a more complete update covering the functionality, performance and security will be covered,” said Tétreault. However, should you be interested in the joint program between ETI-NET and Quest, and would like to be part of the current Beta program, then please feel free to contact us.

It is not by accident that HPE CEO Neri stresses the importance of clouds and of tapping into the cloud experience as it’s clearly making a significant contribution to the future of data centers centralized or even scattered to the very edge of customer engagement. Should you be interested in knowing more about the work we are doing in support of data and data backup to cloud services providers or simply want to know more about ETI-NET, then give us a call or simply email us – we would be happy to talk with you any time. And stay safe; maintain separation, let’s get through this pandemic together!

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

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