Bus-Tech, Inc., a supplier of data center connectivity products, announced enhancements to its virtual tape library (VTL) solution for small to medium mainframe environments. The company unveiled Mainframe Data Library (MDL) model 100S, part of a modular, scalable family of VTL controllers for IBM, IBM compatible and Fujitsu mainframes. The MDL-100S offers self-contained storage and multiple data protection options. With the release of the MDL-100S, storage capacity has been doubled to 9 TB of usable RAID storage.
The MDL-100S is the entry level for the product line, Jim O'Connor, director of product marketing, Bus-Tech, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "It is a complete turnkey solution targeted at places that have say, 12-20 mainframe tape drives, and basically there is enough capacity in there to hold over 12,000 tape cartridges of information." With the upgrade to the existing product, says O'Connor. Bus-Tech doubled the capacity of the controller, increased performance by about 30%, and added new features. Features include those incorporated into Bus-Tech's Virtuent release 7 - z/OS master console support, phone-home capabilities, and encryption with RSA key management support.
The MDL-100S is built on the technology of the MDL product family and the Virtuent software engine. Assuming a three-to-one compression ratio, the MDL-100S presents over 25 TB of storage for tape data - the equivalent of more than 12,500 fully-utilized 3490E cartridges.
For disaster recovery purposes, Virtuent Replicator provides scheduled or mainframe-initiated asynchronous replication to secondary and tertiary sites via Internet Protocol while Virtuent Tape Backup gives users the option to backup the internal disks to IBM LTO-4 tape autoloader. Bus-Tech has partners with IBM's Business Continuity Recovery Services to support MDL in their recovery sites.
Bus-Tech says that data centers can see performance improvements with the MDL, including accelerated batch processing, data facility hierarchical storage management (DFHSM), and backup and restore processes. The MDL-100S is available in either FICON or ESCON configurations, and emulates up to 32 tape drives (3480/90 and 3590) on the mainframe.
For more information, visit the Bus-Tech website.