Tributary Systems: Part of a Personal History

It occurred to me the other day that as of July 2020 I’ve been involved with NonStop for 25 years. Yes, I started working for Tandem in July of 1995, first as a Manufacturing Program Manager, when Tandem manufactured most everything they sold! After a year in the Manufacturing Organization, I transferred to Development as an Engineering Program and Product Manager for the next 16 years. Then, after being personally selected (!) for the Enhanced Early Retirement Program at HP, I moved on to Tributary Systems, where of course I am today.

Although I managed several processor programs while at Tandem, Compaq, and HP, I was primarily involved with storage. I managed many of the Hard Disk Drive Qualification programs, the first Solid State Disk Qualification, plus all the physical tape, tape library hardware, library management software, and Virtual Tape programs during my tenure. It was all very interesting, and I had the pleasure to work with teams of extremely qualified professionals, both within HP as well as with various suppliers.

One of these suppliers was Tributary Systems. TSI was involved with NonStop even prior to my beginning in 1995. While I don’t want to repeat a well-known history, let’s just say that the vast majority of NonStop physical tape, tape libraries and library management software, as well as tape support and repairs have been sourced by NonStop from Tributary Systems.

So when, in 2012, TSI offered me a position, it was an easy choice to make, especially when I learned of their Storage Director® Backup Appliance.  Storage Director is the industry leading software defined, policy-based and tiered enterprise backup virtualization solution that enables data from any host, OS or backup application, to be backed up to any storage device, medium or technology. For Hybrid Multi-Cloud-based backup, Storage Director interfaces with IBM’s Cloud Object Storage, Hitachi’s HCP, or any S3 compatible cloud.

For any given customer environment, Storage Director is fully customer configurable, allowing optimal continuous availability backup, replication and DR solution resulting in the lowest cost, highest performance and reliability backup solution. Storage Director is available in configurations from 10 TB to multiple petabytes, providing appropriate capacity for all enterprises. The built-in methodology Storage Director uses for data reduction is hardware enabled LZ compression with redundant secondary software based compression and AES 256 bit encryption coupled with WAN optimization and latency management for replication.

Just check out the extensive list of features Storage Director provides for NonStop Backup and Restore operations:

• Storage Director allows users to fully virtualize and automate backup and restore operations, with:
  • Lights-out operation and remote administration
  • Separate front and back end processing
  • Superior per node performance, eliminating issues meeting customer specified backup windows
• Users can define policies that allow flexible data storage and migration strategies, including:
  • The ability to separate data into pools and apply different protection policies such as retention, replication, and tiering. Appropriate and automated movement of data to lower cost media such as tape, NAS or public cloud for archival is key to the cost effectiveness of Storage Director
  • The functionality necessary to perform real-time backups while concurrently and transparently migrating older data from legacy tape or proprietary dedup storage to cloud object storage solutions
  • Storage Director allows consolidation of all user storage subsystems for simplified backup/restore operations
• Storage Director is secure, incorporating built in encryption algorithms while fully supporting Information Dispersal Algorithm (IDA) or Erasure Coding. The security features provided by public cloud vendors such as AWS, Google and Azure are leveraged by Storage Director
• Storage Director is expandable and scalable for both capacity and performance
• An intuitive, easy-to-use GUI is incorporated within Storage Director, simplifying system configuration, administration and daily operations
• Storage Director may be employed in open, heterogeneous multi-platform environments:
  • Such as Windows, Linux, UNIX (AIX, HPUX, Solaris), IBM iSeries (AS/400), HPE NonStop (Tandem), HPE VMS, and VMware^® among others
  • All major backup management applications such as Spectrum Protect/TSM, NetBackup^®, Veeam, Commvault Simpana^®, BRMS (iSeries) and ABS/MDMS (OpenVMS) are supported
• Storage Director is transparent to users and existing applications
• Storage Director can be installed and operated on non-proprietary, less expensive, hardware, avoiding costly “supplier lock-in”.
• Storage Director eliminates the requirement for personnel to be on-site for manual tape operations, such as loading and unloading cartridges. This consideration takes on increased importance given the current global pandemic.

And recall that Tributary Systems has been an HPE partner for over 22 years!

 Of course, if you’d like additional information on NonStop Tape or Storage Director, visit www.tributary.com, or call Matt Allen at 713-492-7434.

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