IBM has made enhancements to the IBM DS8900F and IBM TS7770 storage families.
The improvements were announced in an IBM blog post by Eric Herzog, vice president, product marketing and management, IBM Storage Systems.
As part of the update, IBM has announced that the memory cache in the IBM DS8950F storage solution has been increased 70% to 3.4 terabytes. This enhancement enables users to consolidate more IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE mission-critical workloads into a single storage solution. For example, the consolidation of 8 IBM DS8870 systems into a single IBM DS8950F solution can potentially reduce CAPEX by 35% and OPEX over a 3-year period by 91% while continuing to meet performance service-level agreements (SLAs).
In addition, Herzog said, IBM continues to provide high levels of synergy with the mainframe by enabling the integration of IBM DS8910F within the IBM z15 model T02 and LinuxONE III model LT2 solutions, announced on April 14. This mainframe-storage integration can help to maximize the value of mainframe environments in a single 19-inch industry standard rack.
Along with increases in performance and efficiency within the DS8900F family itself, IBM Storage also announced multiple enhancements to the way IBM DS8900F and TS7770 systems work together with the goal of accelerating mainframe-driven enterprises. Transparent cloud tiering (TCT) automates the movement of data to and from the cloud and offloads much of the management workload to the DS8900F and TS7770 storage systems, reducing mainframe CPU utilization by 50 percent for these tasks.
Additionally, said Herzog, the IBM DS8900F has added the capability to compress data prior to transfer across TCP/IP connections to TS7770 systems configured as object storage targets.
IBM has also improved security within the storage for IBM Z ecosystem.
By adding SP 800-131A compliant encryption, in-flight encryption can be extended between DS8900F arrays and all individual VTL systems in a TS7770 grid. With no need to configure key groups, key managers, or other configurable items, encryption is now even easier within your mission-critical hybrid multi-cloud environments. Also, IBM TS7770 solutions now offer dual control security authentication with a “maker” and “checker” approach designed for multi-tenancy environments.
The Data Facility Storage Management Subsystem (DFSMS) leverages TCT to create full volume backups to the cloud which can be restored to any DS8900F system. This dovetails with new cloud-based disaster recovery capabilities for IBM VTL and tape solutions.
Datasets can now be restored to any empty TS7770 system outside TS7770 grids using Cloud Connect technology. As volumes are created in a grid, TS7770 Cloud Connect copies them to the assigned cloud pools, where they can be managed by DFSMS. Version retention is enabled within each cloud pool, allowing previous versions to be retained long enough to meet any requirement. These new capabilities are supported in IBM Cloud, AWS S3, IBM Cloud Object Storage on premises, and RStor.
These new announcements, Herzog noted, "are a sign of constant technological innovation to further strengthen the mission-critical capabilities of the IBM DS8900F and IBM TS7700, enabling the storage foundation for your mission-critical multi-cloud environments."
IBM also announced SAS interface and Ethernet enhancements to IBM TS1160 tape drives, and new support of TS1160 drives by IBM TS4500 tape libraries.
For more information about IBM Storage support for multi-cloud mainframe environments, go here.