IBM i Shops Turn to Vault400 for Protection

October 7, 2014 Alex Woodie

A pair of New Jersey companies have adopted United Computer Group‘s Vault400 service to store backups and protect their IBM i environments, the vendor announced recently.

Hi-Tech Health, a healthcare claims servicer based in Hackettstown, and Congoleum, a flooring manufacturer based in Mercerville, are the latest success stories touted by UCG, which is based near Cleveland, Ohio.

Vault400 wasn’t the first backup as a service (BaaS) plan used by Hi-Tech Health. According to UCG, the company had a relationship with a separate BaaS provider, but it failed to get the company back up and running in an acceptable timeframe following a disaster declaration.

After touring UCG’s data center, Hi-Tech Health president Michael Carrara felt comfortable choosing Vault400’s cloud-based backup and recovery service, with a 12-hour recovery time objective (RTO). “After meeting your staff and receiving a detailed tour of your data center, I felt confident that my data will be in safe hands with UCG,” Carrara says in a press release.

Congoleum also selected the Vault400 BaaS offering with the 12-hour RTO. The company was looking to move beyond tape backups for its Power5-based system, and Vault400’s approachâ€”which utilizes a native IBM i agent that moves encrypted backups over the network to UCG’s data center–fit the bill.

“The installation and setup were quick and painless,” says Dan McCullough, manager of datacenter operations for Congoleum. “Vladimir [Capitanov, UCG’s lead engineer] really knows the product and process very well, which made the setup seamless. The seeding went well, and progressed more quickly than expected.”

Congoleum has yet to call on Vault400 during a disaster, but the service is already paying dividends. “We realized immediate benefits including reduced disaster recovery costs,” McCullough says. ” The need to handle tapes on a daily basis has been eliminated â€¦ Additionally, if I need to restore a file, I don’t need to retrieve a tape, load it, restore the file, and then reset the drive for the next save. So that makes my life a lot easier.”