Hardware Consolodation with Tributary Systems

It’s been a month since the 2019 NonStop Bootcamp, but one of the comments Jeff Kyle made during his Keynote Address still sticks in my mind. Mr. Kyle stated that Virtual NonStop X will be placed into production environments in 2020. Ok, but what’s the motivation for customers to move away from converged systems?

When I began my association with Tandem back in 1995, there was no choice for customers; everything was sold as a “converged” system (although that terminology was never used). At that time all the hardware was designed and manufactured by Tandem, from the system mechanical packaging right down to the PCB assemblies. Well, over the years, as NonStop has moved from Tandem to Compaq, to HP and finally HPE, the trend has been to use more and more “off-the-shelf” hardware (albeit HP manufactured hardware). Now there’s Virtualized NonStop, where mission critical workloads can be deployed in a standardized IT environment based on VMware.

Why? Fundamentally hardware cost- TCO is reduced by the use of standardized hardware and virtualization allows for the reduction of hardware footprint as well as allowing temporary “scale-up” for transient workloads, without permanent hardware reconfiguration.

But what about backup- is there any way to leverage existing Enterprise storage infrastructure for use with NonStop servers, whether NonStop Itanium or NonStop X? In fact there is, Tributary Systems’ Storage Director!

• Storage Director is a high performance, software defined, policy-based and tiered backup virtualization solution that enables data from any host, OS or backup application, to be backed up to any storage device, medium or technology, including Cloud Object Storage, HPE StoreOnce dedup disk, tape or any S3 compatible private or public cloud target. Storage Director is a fully virtualized target for all HPE NonStop Servers, any backup application such as Spectrum Protect, NetBackup, Commvault, Veeam, etc. as well as BRMS for IBM AS/400/Power i and enables policy-based data pools to be created and backed up to multiple targets and replicated for remote storage and DR
• Storage Director, when properly configured, has the ability to internally or externally cache backups on-premise and then push the data to a public or private cloud via customer defined policies. Caching provides for immediately accessible backups, and reduces or eliminates ingress and egress fees. Storage Director is now certified compatible with Hitachi G350, G600 and G950 and IBM Storwize V5000, V7000 and HPE P2000 arrays. Internal cache is fully configurable per customer requirements, and is shipped from Tributary Systems fully integrated and tested.
• Storage Director is unique in being able to present a single target / solution for backing up HPE NonStop/Tandem, HPE VMS, as well as ALL open environments, such as Linux, Windows, UNIX, etc. and other proprietary host platforms, such as IBM Power i/iSeries/AS400, on a single node
• Storage Director is also certified for AWS, Google, IBM and Hitachi object storage
• Storage Director’s extreme backup and restore (Read and Write) performance allows for reducing backup windows, lowering backup costs and consolidating backup solutions

Simply put, Storage Director is the most straightforward and best way to connect any NonStop server to any storage device or the Cloud (Public or Private). Storage Director provides for secure and high-performance Backup/ Restore operations at the lowest cost. Why continue with “silo” thinking for backup infrastructure, while HPE NonStop is moving forward with hardware agnostic processors?

As a personal note, I’d like to wish all those who read and enjoy the “NonStop Insider” Happy Holidays and a wonderful 2020.

Of course, if you’d like additional information on Storage Director, visit www.tributary.com, or call Matt Allen at 817-786-3066 (office) or 713-492-7434 (cell).

Storage Director allows NonStop professionals to “augment what they have and use it in creative new ways!”

www.tributary.com