Sepaton and Bus-Tech Partnership

SEPATON, Inc. and Bus-Tech, Inc. announced at Storage Networking World Fall (SNW) 2009 a partnership to enable mainframe environments to implement disk-based backup and recovery seamlessly without changing their backup policies. The combined, certified solution features the SEPATON S2100-ES2 virtual tape library (VTL) and Bus-Tech’s Mainframe Data Library (MDL) model 100V for direct-to-VTL connectivity for ESCON and FICON mainframe users.

The combined solution has already been purchased by solutions provider ComSource at Central Vermont Public Service. “Central Vermont Public Service originally chose a SEPATON ES2 VTL data protection solution three years ago to provide faster restores, less tape handling and faster backups to our open systems environment,” said Tracy Adams, manager of technical services for CVPS. “The benefits we received from using the SEPATON VTL in our open systems environment became so compelling that we decided to purchase the Bus-Tech solution, which allows us to use it to backup both our open systems and IBM Z Series platform. We are leveraging our investment in the VTL a second time because consolidation of our backup infrastructure saves us money, time and resources. The S2100 VTL allows us to do more for less.”

 CVPS, an electric company in Rutland, VT

“ComSource has many customers like CVPS who have used a SEPATON VTL for open systems alongside a mainframe backup infrastructure,” said Kevin Hanlon, president of ComSource. “Once the technology is proven in open systems, it is a logical next step to ask where else it can be used to gain the same benefits. SEPATON’s grid-based architecture allows enterprise-class customers to add more performance and capacity on demand. As a result, CVPS could backup its mainframe to their existing SEPATON VTL with only incremental expansion. Saving cost and improving operations is critical in today’s economic environment. Being able to add performance or capacity as needed to meet new requirements without adding footprint or management complexity is appealing to our customers.”

By combining SEPATON’s VTL with Bus-Tech’s direct-to-tape mainframe connectivity solutions, mainframe customers are now able to fully share in the benefits of SEPATON’s advanced virtual tape system.

These benefits include:

• Industry-leading backup and restore times
• Scalability to keep pace with data growth
• Simplified data management
• Unparalleled extensibility across the enterprise

Customers in a mainframe environment can get these benefits while using their existing mainframe tape management software, without changes to backup processes.

“Our partnership with Bus-Tech allows us to grow our presence in enterprise data centers by expanding into new mainframe environments as well as by allowing current distributed systems customers to extend the benefits of the SEPATON VTL into converged environments,” said Linda Mentzer, senior director, product and program management, SEPATON, Inc. “Delivering a single, converged data backup and recovery scheme combining mainframe and open systems reduces costs and management complexity by providing a common fast and reliable backup and restore solution across the entire datacenter, which are attractive considerations for most data center managers.”

“Partnering with SEPATON enables our customers to combine mainframe connectivity with distributed systems for advanced backup and recovery so they can perform normal tape processing without changes to their existing applications,” said Ralph Armstrong, vice president of product management, Bus-Tech, Inc. “SEPATON is an ideal partner for us because together we uniquely provide a highly scalable solution ideal for large enterprises. Customers can take advantage of the strength of each system to reduce the overall cost associated with data protection, regardless of backup environment.”