Migration to new NonStop systems is now under way; good news for ETI-NET customers as this migration proves to be totally transparent.

Migrations are never far from our minds. With the global pandemic now beginning to show signs of tapering off, migrations are beginning to commence as many of us head for cooler climates. and when it comes to IT migrating systems and applications remains constant. It may be true that rust never sleeps but then too much the same can be said about today’s IT product offerings.

Staying abreast of the latest HPE NonStop updates to its traditional NonStop system represents a major goal for ETI-NET. Knowing how committed the NonStop development team is to the Intel x86 roadmaps there is always a change of processor about to happen. Intel has made no secret about its commitment to the x86 architecture and for HPE and the ProLiant team, it’s only logical that they embrace any updates to the basic processor.

This is now showing up in the NonStop community as NonStop customers and partners begin their migration to the newly released NonStop NS8 X4 and NonStop NS4 X4 systems. Marketed as providing greater security at the silicon level they still provide an additional bump in performance depending, as is common to say, on your usage of NonStop. Use case scenarios are now being developed by NonStop partners and it’s becoming evident that NS8 and NS4 will soon be widely deployed.

For ETI-NET the experience we have gained to date has been positive. Having now gained firsthand experience with these new NonStop systems in the UK and Australia, we can see that the NonStop team has once again delivered systems where migrations can be readily pursued with minimal risk to the enterprise or to their customers. “The migrations that NonStop customers have pursued to date involving our BackBox (BB) product line,” said ETI-NET COO, Sylvain Tétreault, “has confirmed what we expected. For ETI-NET, the migration to NS8 and NS4 is completely transparent – no changes required and no new versions of BB needed. Simply further confirmation of the great benefits that come with deploying BB on NonStop.”

When it comes to our recently announced additions to the BB product line, interest in the QUEST QoreStor feature continues to grow. “We are pleased with the response we are getting from the NonStop community and in particular, how well it has been received by NonStop users in AsiaPac/Japan (AP/J),” said Tétreault. “Perhaps the question we are asked most often is ‘how an existing Virtual Tape Controller (VTC) with encryption can be migrated to BB with QoreStor using QoreStor encryption?’”

In answering this question, ETI-NET has a unique response that will make the migration easy. “The BackBox/QoreStor allows the customer to keep a hybrid environment, one dedupe with QoreStor and one non-dedupe with regular storage.  So the beauty is that the customer can, on the same BackBox VTC, create a datastore without dedupe and move its current tapes there and create a second datastore with QoreStor for all the new backup,” explained Tétreault. “Once the legacy backup in the first datastore expires, then the disk spaces can be moved to the second datastore for QoreStor to use it. So no migration is needed. The BackBox allows the customer to keep its legacy tapes from the previous VTC version and use the new QoreStor feature for all new backups.”  “If no encryption was used, the migration is even easier.  The customer just needs to click and drag the existing tape backup into the datastore with QoreStor and the dedupe is done automatically,” added Tetreault.

Living in the northern hemisphere we have all seen the flocks of Canadian geese that form as seasons change. For eons, geese head south for the winter and they know instinctively where they should go. IT professionals have known of system migrations for a very long time and for many of these IT professionals, there is always some concern over the direction to be taken. For NonStop users with BB there are no such concerns as even with the biggest of NonStop system migrations, where a full system replacement might be required as is the case with the latest NonStop system offerings, backward compatibility is a priority for NonStop development.

As has been demonstrated in recent times, ETI-NET can be part of your migration plans and migration can take place transparently to any mission critical applications running on NonStop. Embracing new features like QoreStor can be pursued with similar levels of transparency and for systems that run 24 x 7 x 365, this is of paramount importance. Rest assured, working so closely as we do with NonStop development, where HPE resells ETI-NET products including BB, we are just as non-stop as the NonStop systems themselves.

Should you have any questions about your own upcoming migration to NS8 or NS4 and would like to know more about just how transparent a BB migration can be, then don’t hesitate giving us a call or sending us an email.

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