Data protection vendor Sepaton has partnered with Luminex Software, a developer of products geared toward mainframe channel gateways, connectivity and data storage.
The team-up will enable enterprises with mainframe environments to implement disk-based backup and recovery without changing their backup policies, according to the companies.
The combined offering blends the Sepaton S2100-ES2 VTL (virtual tape library) and Luminexs Channel Gateway 3400 for direct-to-VTL connectivity for ESCON and FICON mainframe users.
Announced at Storage Networking World, the partnership was sparked by requests from Sepaton customers, said the companys vice president of marketing, Linda Mentzer.
“Weve been very successful with very large enterprises since we started in the open systems virtual tape market in 2003,” she said. “Many of these customers started asking us about backing up their mainframes as well as their other systems.”
The company is not targeting the mainframe market, or shifting its strategy, she added.
Rather, the new partnership broadens its existing market but will primarily allow Sepaton to cater to current customers who want backup and recovery for their mainframe environments.
Mentzer said she expects that Luminex customers will also appreciate the opportunity to have data protection in other parts of their environments through the Sepaton partnership.
With its Channel Gateways, Luminex has also secured very large enterprises on its customer list.
The products stream data from mainframe channels to Fibre Channel fabrics, in order to securely encrypt mainframe tape data for backup, archive and distribution.
Another significant benefit to Channel Gateways, Luminex noted, is that they contain enterprise-level encryption at the fabric level, with no impact to CPU cycles, and no change required to mainframe tape management software.
Sepatons VTL is an intelligent, disk-based backup and restore appliance that appears to back up applications as a standard physical tape library.
According to the company, this allows for high availability while reducing storage, management and recovery costs.
By mixing the two technologies, the companies note that mainframe customers will now be able to tap into the benefits of Sepatons VTL for scalability, simplified data management and extensibility across the enterprise, and take advantage of Luminexs Channel Gateways for mainframe-specific capability.
“So many customers have a mixed environment, and this is a response to those needs,” said Mentzer.
