Fujitsu America, the U.S.-based arm of the Japanese IT company, and Quantum, a maker of data storage and backup systems from San Jose, Calif., announced today that they have partnered to provide large businesses with a joint solution that the companies argue can help lower the cost of protecting and archiving data, particularly those with legacy mainframe environments.

Comprised of Fujitsu’s unified data protection appliance, the ETERNUS CS8000, and Quantum’s Scalar LTO tape libraries, the offering is meant to help organizations with proprietary mainframe virtual tape libraries (VTLs) or big data backup requirements adopt a more consolidated and open way of managing a tiered backup environment. The program comes to North America after the storage systems providers launched a similar one in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, according to Alex Lam, vice president of Fujitsu America’s Enterprise Business division.

“Fujitsu and Quantum have achieved great success partnering in EMEA to deliver backup and archiving solutions to our customers, which includes enterprises with large mainframe environments,” said Lam in a statement. Extending the partnership, he noted, is expected to help the companies extend their reach to “a wider set of customers, especially those in key verticals like Federal, Media & Entertainment and Energy,” he noted.

The ETERNUS CS8000 from Fujitsu is a unified data protection appliance with integrated disaster recovery features including data mirroring and replication. Other features include cloud gateway WORM (write once, read many), NAS and VTL support, SAN and Ethernet connectivity and built-in data deduplication.

Quantum’s Scalar tape library line includes the high-end i6000. It boasts the highest LTO tape slot density with nearly 5 petabytes (PB) of capacity per 19-inch rack, according to Quantum. The dual-robot system scales to 75 PB and features the company’s Extended Data Life Management (EDLM) technology, an automated data integrity checking solution that identifies problems before they lead to data loss.

Together, Fujitsu and Quantum can help American companies realize some of the storage efficiency benefits their combined solutions are providing for companies across the pond, according to Robert Clark, senior vice president of Product Operations for Quantum. “This new partnership enables us to provide mainframe customers here in North America with the same solution benefits that customers realize throughout Europe, including improving uptime and protection for mission-critical mainframe applications while reducing backup storage costs.”