September 14, 2026
LaserVault, the popular virtual tape library (VTL) for IBM i environments from Electronic Storage Corp., has gained support for iSCSI, giving customers more connectivity options beyond Fibre Channel and SAS connections. The new iSCSI support will be particularly useful for customers running the LaserVault ViTL offering in the cloud.
LaserVault ViTL is a disk-based backup solution that emulates LTO drives in IBM i and open systems environments. Customers have typically plugged the LaserVault device – either the appliance sold by Electronic Storage Corp. or the ViTL software running on an X86 server – into the IBM i server using those Fibre Channel connections.
That setup worked well on-prem, as most IBM i shops were already using the Fibre Channel to connect their LTO tape drives to the IBM i server. The LaserVault solution just re-used the existing Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) and performed the backup straight to the storage in the LaserVault offering (typically SSDs these days).
However, Fibre Channel typically is not offered in public clouds. While Electronic Storage Corp. has worked with a few private cloud providers to offer Fibre Channel-connected LaserVault devices in their environments, it is not the norm.
What users will typically find in public clouds and most private clouds these days is an Ethernet network, which is used both for communication to the Internet as well as communication between the server and the storage. Storage area networks (SANs), which typically utilize Fibre Channel, are similarly absent in the cloud for storing and serving databases. Instead, file-based approaches, such as S3 object storage, are more prevalent.
So instead of forcing clouds to buy Fibre Channel HBAs to support LaserVault and its block-level storage needs, it made sense for Electronic Storage Corp. to adapt its offering to support the Ethernet-based block-level storage protocols used in clouds. And that’s where iSCSI comes in.
iSCSI, which stands for Internet Small Computer Systems Interface, is a networking standard that connects data storage facilities by sending block-level SCSI data over standard TCP/IP network. By supporting iSCSI in its LaserVault ViTL offerings, Electronic Storage Corp. is able to connect their backup appliance directly to IBM i hosts over the local Ethernet network, eliminating the need for Fibre Channel and the expensive HBAs that they require.
“We’ve added support for iSCSI connectivity, and basically what that does for people is allows them to run LaserVault ViTL to do backups and restores and not have to have physical Fibre Channel card or SAS card in a machine,” said Electronic Storage Corp vice president Ax Synar. “So they can run us in inside of a VM and connect to us over TCP/IP through the networking that’s available within a VM or a cloud environment, and not have to have Qlogic Fibre Channel cards or physical cables.”
The advantages are clear, as this approach significantly widens the potential user base for the LaserVault product. Private and public cloud environments that don’t offer Fibre Channel connectivity can now adopt LaserVault for backups.
There is a slight drawback to using iSCSI when it comes to throughput. Developer Erik Dabrowsky benchmarked the iSCSI connection providing 380 MB/sec to 400 MB/sec over a single 10 Gb/sec Ethernet link in the company’s lab. That’s about half the speed that customers could expect to see over a Fibre Channel link.
However, the speed reduction is mitigated by the fact that users can easily add additional virtualized Ethernet links to their LaserVault installation. “It’s really easy to set up multiple tape devices,” Dabrowsky said. “So you can use more than one tape device that increases your backup speed.”
There’s no theoretical reason a customer couldn’t add five, ten, or even twenty virtual Ethernet links to their 10 Gb Ethernet setups. IBM documentation used to recommend a maximum of sixteen virtual Ethernet links per IBM i partition, but that recommendation has disappeared in recent versions, Dabrowsky said.
Cloud environments often cap the network capacity for customers. They might offer 4Gb of throughput overall, and it’s up to the customer to allocate fraction of that to support their primary disk I/O and their other network activities, such as backups.
More testing on these setups is in the works, according Al Jensen. Another vice president at Electronic Storage Corp. “These results demonstrate the potential of iSCSI connectivity to deliver substantial throughput while using standard Ethernet infrastructure,” Jensen stated. “There is additional testing underway to explore performance across different network and cloud configurations.”
While Electronic Storage Corp. developed iSCSI support to make it easier to install and run LaserVault in cloud environments, there’s no reason that customers can’t use iSCSI for on-prem implementations.
According to Dabrowsky, IBM i customers who are currently backing up to tape drives over 12 Gb Serial Attached SCSCI (SAS) connections may be interested in moving to Ethernet-based backups using LaserVault over iSCSI so they don’t have to purchase a Fibre Channel HBA.
“It seems to me like a smaller shop could definitely use iSCSI to back up their stuff over Ethernet and still get reasonably good throughput,” Dabrowsky said.
Electronic Storage Corp. launched the LaserVault ViTL back in 2018 to provide a high-performance backup appliance for IBM i shops.
In addition to serving as a primary backup for IBM i hosts, LaserVault also acts as a bridge device for VTLs from vendors like Cohesity and Rubrik, which are popular among users of open system servers but lack the IBM i-specific capabilities that are important in the IBM i environment, like restricted-mode saves and D-mode IPLs.
LaserVault is hosting a 30-minute Webinar titled Backup Without Tape on September 22 at 1 p.m. CT. You can register for it at the www.laservault.com.
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