New website is up!

Hey Al put up the new website at www.laservaultbackup.com check it out! It looks a lot better than before, I think.

Sorry I haven’t been posting here, lately we have been quite busy.

This Whole Thing Was A Long Time Coming

We first thought of this product over ten years ago, when we developed a SCSI tape emulator for the AS/400. We were using it to get documents to the PC at breakneck speed. We realized it could be used to backup AS/400 libraries and objects also. But disk space was much more expensive then, and the capacities were too small.

We’re working on a browser-based version of the software. More on that later.

More advantages of disk-based backup

Another issue with disk-based backup, is that you use the entire disk,

because it is random access. That means you can access any point on

the disk in the same amount of time.

 

For example, if you have 200 GB of backup each night on your AS/400,

and it compresses 8 to 1, you can keep over a months worth of backups

on a 1 terabyte hard drive.

 

The objects stored in IBM midrange libraries tend to be compressible

up to 8 times, this means a portable, USB pow3red hard drive can be used to make an

offsite copy of up to a terabyte of IBM AS/400 or I5 data -  for a

cost of about $100.

Tape

The reasons for using tape in the past were capacity, and cost. With
the high compression made possible with Laservault backup, and the
continually plumetting cost of disk drives, there is no economic or
operational aadvantage in using tape today.

Tape is open-air technology – the disk is hermetically sealed. Disk heads
do not touch the magnetic media. Tapes can easily become damaged if
they are dropped, through crimping of the tape. Although tape alignment problems are not the issue that they once were, a sealed disk drive always uses the same heads and alignment to
read the data, as the data was written with.

Bill

Hey,

Bill wants to contribute to this blog so I am going to add him as soon as he signs up for a wordpress account. He feels he can give a more “upbeat” picture of LV Backup, a sort of yin to my yang. Or yang to my yin?

Do I seem negative? I suppose that I am a “glass is half empty” style of person, but in this line of work that is a good thing. I sometimes feel like if I bring up anything that the customers want, in terms of new features or changes to the software, it’s like I’m being defeatest or something. But somebody needs to be the one to that, you know? It seems like we get so caught up in that whole “Wow, look at that, that’s so cool!” mentality, that we lose sight of the small things that for the guy that actually has to use the product means “hey this is nice” versus “argh! this is a pain in the @$#%.”

Our website sucks

Our website sucks, and the first order of business should be to clean it up, and make it even remotely presentable.

First Post

I was going to title it ”Inaugural Post”, but since I’m using IE and not FireFox I don’t trust my spelling. Then it occurred to me that “Inaugural” sounds pretentious – and that is something that we at LVBackup are not about.

So, this blog is going to be about our work on a cool new spinoff product we’ve got called LaserVault Backup – it really doesn’t have anything to do with the LaserVault product, but our marketing team made us call it that for “brand continuity” *cough* Well, I’m not supposed to editorialize here.

Anyways, we’ll keep you guys and gals posted about the product, as it’s a work in progress we’ll be updating it regularly.