With all the HA/DR acquisition activity going on this year with industry heavyweights Vision Solutions, Lakeview Technology, and DataMirror, it's important to remember there's more happening in the space than big acquisitions. Case in point is United Computer Group's VAULT400 [2], which is a managed service for online backup and recovery. IBM has recently approved UCG's VAULT400 product and service as a "Managed Service Value Ad Enhancement" for the IBM System i, System p, System z, and several IBM point-of-sale terminals.

"Our long-term business partnership with IBM is further enhanced with IBM awarding the VAULT400 solution the 'Value Add' status," notes Jim Kandrac, president of UCG. "Many of our new VAULT400 clients are in need of a server upgrade, and this Managed Service Value Add will enable our sales and technical teams to provide a turnkey hardware, software application solution to their online backup and disaster recovery requirements."

In addition to handling System i data, VAULT400 can back up an entire organization's business-critical data to VAULT400's secure data center. The data is encrypted, as you might expect, and it's available online at all times for immediate, user-initiated recovery. In fact, the company recently patented part of its technology for "Systems and Methods for Data Backup over a Network." The patent relates to a feature called Quick File Scanning, UCG says, which checks for new files and any changes in existing files at the data source by comparing the hash numbers of the present data files with the hash numbers of the data files in the baseline copy.

"I am continuously amazed at the ways in which VAULT400 earns its keep!" notes Mike Lemon, IT delivery manager for the Corrpro Companies. "I performed a restore this afternoon that took a small fraction of the time that it would have taken me to locate the tape, load it, execute the command, and re-archive the tape," he explains. "In addition, the backup solution provided by VAULT400 is much faster and more robust and dependable than our old method. No more media errors, write protects, jammed-up job queries, or shuffling tapes to our offsite storage. The bottom line — less downtime, less effort, more peace of mind."