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July 10 2025|8 Min|technology

How to improve cyber resilience for IBM iSeries with Cohesity and LaserVault

Protect against modern threats with this innovative combination.

IBM iSeries Hero Image

IBM iSeries, renowned for its stability, security, and scalability, continues to power essential operations across various industries—including finance, manufacturing, healthcare, and retail—collectively managing billions of dollars in transactions while storing customer data.

This blog details how the combination of LaserVault’s specialized IBM i backup solutionsopens in a new tab with Cohesity Data Cloud protects and secures your most valuable data. Together, these products offer an integrated, secure, and cost-effective approach to protecting crucial systems without compromise.

The IBM iSeries landscape in 2025

IBM iSeriesopens in a new tab (AS/400) systems, introduced over three decades ago, remain deeply ingrained in the IT infrastructures of Global 500 companies. With an estimated 100,000 active systems still operational worldwide, IBM i remains a backbone for enterprise resource planning, supply chain, and core business applications. Its reputation for rock-solid performance and integrated architecture has made it indispensable, even as cloud adoption and digital transformation initiatives accelerate across the enterprise.

However, the strategic value of IBM i data is now drawing increased scrutiny from security, compliance, and business continuity teams. Enterprise data is growing exponentially, and these systems host large volumes of highly sensitive information. Regulatory frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX now demand more transparency, retention control, and recoverability than ever before. As a result, businesses are under pressure to modernize their IBM i data protection strategies—not by replacing the platform, but by integrating it into broader hybrid cloud and cyber resilience technologies.

Challenges in protecting IBM i Data

While IBM i is lauded for its stability, its traditional backup approaches often fail to deliver desired resilience outcomes. Many organizations still rely on tape-based backups, which are slow to recover, operationally intensive, and vulnerable to both environmental risks and human error. These methods also fall short when facing destructive cyberattacks, where recovery time and data immutability are critical. The lack of native integration with cloud storage and modern security solutions further compounds the challenge, creating silos that limit visibility and response.

Additionally, IBM i environments often lack real-time monitoring, centralized management, and are unable to meet evolving compliance and business continuity requirements. With increasing demands for shorter recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs), incumbent backup strategies are no longer sufficient. Enterprises must now look to integrate IBM i systems into a unified, automated, and secure cyber resilience strategy—one that aligns with both IT modernization goals and risk mitigation priorities.

LaserVault ViTL and key features

It is a known best practice (to optimize cost and performance) with IBM i systems to use Virtual Tape Libraries (ViTL) for backup. LaserVaultopens in a new tab, a leading vendor designed specifically for IBM i Systems, provides a mechanism to move data to ViTL systems by using Microsoft Windows Server and connecting to a Storage system that is then the target for the backup. It simplifies backup and recovery operations by saving backups to a hard drive, NAS, SAN, deduplication appliance, or the cloud—eliminating the need for physical tape. ViTL reduces storage costs with its deduplication feature and integrates seamlessly via Fiber Channel or SAS with iSeries, AS/400, System i, Linux, or AIX systems.

Some of the key features of LaserVault ViTL include:

  • Compatibility with BRMS, Robot Save, and other backup software. Virtual tapes are recognized as standard tape media by IBM i and your backup software, giving you more flexibility with additional drives and slots without the need for extra hardware.
  • Greater capacity for cartridges and drives at a lower cost, compared to other VTLs, delivers greater value.
  • Integration with Cohesity Data Cloud.

How Cohesity helps you secure and protect IBM i Systems

Cohesity enables organizations to secure and protect IBM i Systems with Cohesity SmartFilesopens in a new tab, a service of Cohesity Data Cloud. This approach seamlessly integrates immutable target storage, using SMB protocols for enhanced data security and protection. Integrating with LaserVault ViTL to protect your data estate atop Cohesity Data Cloud offers you these outcomes:

  • Speed: Recover from cyberattacks many times faster compared to your previous systems.
  • Security: Improve your security posture, detect threats, and protect data.
  • Scale: Secure and protect IBM i Systems and the rest of your data sources on a single platform, even at a petabyte scale.

You’ll also appreciate other important capabilities about Cohesity Data Cloud, including:

  • Lifecycle management: Ensure data protection through full backups, incremental backups, and point-in-time recovery (PITR) workflows.
  • Storage efficiency: Achieve extremely high storage efficiency with global, variable-length deduplication and compression.
  • Multilayered cyber resilience and ransomware protection: Immutability safeguards backups from being deleted or overwritten for a specified duration or indefinitely.
  • Write once, read many (WORM): Store your backups using the WORM model, ensuring SEC Rule 17a-4(f)opens in a new tab compliance.
  • Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Reduce your data footprint with superior deduplication and compression.
  • Performance at web scale: Improve backup and restore times with scale-out architecture and unlimited scalability as your business grows.
  • Encryption everywhere: Cohesity Data Cloud features AES-256, FIPS-compliant encryption of data in flight and at rest.
  • Resilience: Highly resilient and fault-tolerant, with no single point of failure (SPOF).

We’ve also built specific features for workloads like IBM i Systems to improve your business outcomes, such as:

  • Live view of data written into the Cohesity storage system from IBM iSeries systems.
  • Restricted access to the view by allowing only an authorized set of IP addresses.
  • NTFS permissions restrict access at the File level, viz., read/write/modify/delete.
  • File auditing to record and monitor events occurring on your SMB view.
  • In-flight encryption enables you to use existing network infrastructure and not create isolated/dark/deadnet infrastructure to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks.
  • Data protection to take local snapshots of the live view.
    • Policy-based data replication from one cluster to another cluster for disaster recovery.
    • CloudArchive and Cloud Retrieve your data for long-term retention and disaster recovery in AWS, Azure, GCP, NAS, and S3-compatible storage platforms. Use Cloud Tier to reduce TCO.

Integrated architecture overview: LaserVault + Cohesity

To protect IBM iSeries systems, you need to associate a backup policy. The backup policy includes the backup configuration, a list of File Systems Volume/Volume Group mappings, backup schedules, and retention rules. This helps invoke IBM iSeries systems for backups that land in the LaserVault ViTL Tape Library. A Tape library has multiple Tapes/Tape Drives, which are defined on ViTL. The Tape library (defined on ViTL) is the endpoint that maps to the Cohesity SMB share path (which supports both FQDN and VIP). Cohesity provides this SMB share, which is the Cohesity View—web-scale, globally deduplicated, compressed storage. To use Cohesity View as a storage repository for the IBM iSeries system via LaserVault Virtual Tape Controller, complete the recommended steps below. To the IBM iSeries system, a LaserVault ViTL virtual tape drive appears as a physical drive connected by SCSI or Fiber Channel. The drive appears as media type L8 (i.e., using LTO Gen 8) by default, unless otherwise specified in the Virtual Tape Library for internal configuration files. Catalog information is stored in IBM iSeries, which has a mapping of storage pools. Catalog status on both IBM iSeries and LaserVault ViTL must be in sync. If it goes out of sync, the Catalog on iSeries takes precedence over LaserVault ViTL, and the conflict is resolved.

A closer look at a real-world implementation

Consider the following hypothetical scenario for an enterprise that wants to protect their mission-critical data. For this exercise, the enterprise IT team:

  • Has core legacy applications running on an IBM iSeries (AS/400) system.
  • Requires daily backups, off-site replication, and long-term retention to address compliance requirements.
  • Wants to modernize their backup strategy without disrupting existing workflows.

Let’s examine the solution in this scenario. LaserVault ViTL is deployed on-premises:

  • It emulates an IBM TS3200 tape library.
  • IBM i uses BRMS to back up data directly to a Cohesity View via ViTL.
  • Backups are stored as virtual tape images on the Cohesity View.

Cohesity SmartFiles Views are used to:

  • Mount the Cohesity View as a backup directory.
  • Index and deduplicate the backup data.

The protection policy dictates how the data is replicated to another Cohesity cluster or cloud tier (e.g., AWS, Azure) for disaster recovery Here’s the workflow of the combined solution in action.

  • At the end of the business day, IBM i runs a BRMS job to back up the day’s transactions to ViTL.
  • ViTL stores the backup as a virtual tape image to the Cohesity SmartFiles SMB View.
  • Cohesity takes a snapshot of the SMB View to back up the virtual tape image locally with DataLock (WORM/immutability).
  • Cohesity deduplicates, indexes, and replicates the backup to another Cohesity cluster and CloudArchive target of AWS S3.
  • In case of failure, the IT team can restore via ViTL (from Cohesity cluster storage or Cohesity’s cloud copy).

Key benefits of the integrated Cohesity and LaserVault solution

This solution simplifies your data protection infrastructure with Cohesity DataProtect and LaserVault and makes your enterprise data more resilient.

  • Eliminate tapes and improve recovery performance: Cohesity DataProtect eliminates the need for tapes and reduces your recovery points by using the high ingest throughput of Cohesity Data Cloud.
  • Fast backups: Minimize your backup windows by ingesting data in parallel on the scale-out nodes of Cohesity Data Cloud.
  • Policy-based management: Create policies that specify your application SLA requirements including RPO and retention duration.
  • Remote replication for disaster recovery and migrations: Protect your data offsite and enable disaster recovery and migrations to remote sites, with built-in remote replication. Use flexible replication topologies including site-to-site, one-to-many sites, cascaded, and to the cloud.

Build a future-ready IBM i data strategy

In an era where cyber threats evolve faster than infrastructure refresh cycles, organizations relying on IBM iSeries must not view “legacy” as a liability—but as a foundation to secure and modernize. By integrating LaserVault’s IBM i-focused expertise with Cohesity’s cutting-edge data protection, enterprises can bridge the old and new with confidence. This combined approach ensures resilient, scalable, and intelligent protection for some of your most mission-critical workloads. As data regulations tighten and cyberattacks grow more damaging, protecting your IBM i environment is not just best practice—it’s a business imperative.

Learn more best practices in our technical solution guide.opens in a new tab

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