ABC Financial Switches to LaserVault ViTL and Cohesity for IBM i Backups

CUSTOMER PROFILE

COMPANY

ABC Financial Services, LLC

INDUSTRY

Financial Services

ISSUES

• Due to very high maintenance costs and complex requirements, ABC Financial wants to replace EMC DataDomain for backup and recovery of IBM i
• Must be compatible with new Cohesity appliance and IBM i
• Must easily integrate with BRMS

KEY SOLUTION

LaserVault ViTL Virtual Tape Library Emulation Solution With QLogic/NPIV

ViTL BENEFITS

• Fully integrated with IBM Power Systems and Cohesity
• Emulates a VTL so it's an easy transition from using existing VTL
• Simplifies twice weekly backups of 85TB
• LaserVault solutions engineer very helpful and accommodating

Challenges

ABC Financial Services, LLC, was using Dell/EMC’s DataDomain with a virtual tape library (VTL) to back up 85TB from their two IBM i sites twice weekly.

According to Brian Sowell, Data Center Architect,

“We needed to find a replacement that would lower the maintenance cost and reduce complexity of our backup and recovery functions without a major disruption to our operations.”

The solution also needed to work with BRMS.

Solution

ViTL is a virtual tape backup D2D solution that simplifies the backup and restore process, works with Cohesity and BRMS, and helps provide better protection for IBM i data.

ABC’s Director of Enterprise Systems David Fray says,

“We needed Enterprise systems, and chose Cohesity to replace DataDomain, and LaserVault ViTL to replace our VTL. It was a good fit for our needs.”

Summary

“ViTL does a good job emulating IBM tape libraries,” says Brian.

David adds,

“We didn’t have any concerns about switching to ViTL because we were already using a VTL. We also looked at QUADStor but selected ViTL as our solution and it is working well with our IBM i and Cohesity appliance.”

ABC Financial recently upgraded to using ViTL with QLogic/NPIV.

“So far it’s has been a great experience. We are able to even lower our backup times more with the additional drives. Another great thing was that we were able to keep the existing Atto card and use it along with the QLogic mixed in 2 libraries. So our config on the iSeries didn’t change; we just had 4 additional drives in each library. Basically, we went from 4 to 12 drives. We are pushing around 1.3 GB/s running all 12 drives,” says David.

 

“I believe other companies in the financial industry that are looking for faster backups and restores over using traditional tape would benefit from using the ViTL solution. We had a very good experience working with LaserVault. The Solutions Engineer was very helpful and accommodating to our needs.”

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