Concurrent with IBM's announcement of direct System z mainframe FICON access to DS8700 resident open systems disk, INNOVATION Data Processing is delivering FDRSOS V5.4.74, which the company describes as the first disaster-recovery and distributed data-protection solution to employ new IBM DS8700 z/OS Distributed Data Backup (zDDB) technology.
"While increasingly customers find themselves integrating business processing and consolidating their mainframe and open systems platforms, 81% of respondents in a recent survey report data/storage growth is their biggest data protection challenge," states Thomas J Meehan, INNOVATION spokesman and vice president. "This IBM Data Protection Solutions initiative is a significant announcement. It is the start of a new era of responsiveness and why we are delivering a new version of FDRSOS that combining with the new IBM zDDB technology is the fastest, least disruptive and most efficient z/OS solution for DS8700 disaster recovery and distributed data protection available today."
"The z/OS Distributed Data Backup feature provides the capability to perform backup of open systems data on the IBM System Storage DS8700 over high performance FICON connections," adds Allen Marin, IBM System Storage marketing spokesman.
"Utilizing this new zDDB technology, INNOVATION's FDRSOS is unique in its ability to move distributed data at high performance FICON megabytes per second versus TCP/IP network megabit per second speeds. There is no other backup/restore solution today that has the capability of using high performance Systems zFICON channels to directly read and write the same DS8700 disk volumes used by the open systems business applications themselves," says INNOVATION's Meehan. "This multi-platform backup solution can help clients simplify their heterogeneous backup environments by consolidating and managing them through the mainframe," notes Marin.
SOSINSTANT, the combination of FDRSOS, zDDB and FlashCopy is another first, according to INNOVATION. "Now customers can easily incorporate z/OS management of FlashCopy to create near instantaneous point-in-time copies of the disk volumes open systems business applications are using, allowing disaster recovery and data protection plans for distributed data to include non-disruptive backup and rapid recovery from disk," Meehan observes.
INNOVATION FDRSOS and SOSINSTANT, running on a System z mainframe under z/OS and employing IBM zDDB and FlashCopy technology provide a range of advantages, which include eliminating the need for distributed backup servers with dedicated tape and disk, reducing network congestion by taking distributed data backup off TCP/IP networks; ensuring backup no longer constrains production; and freeing up CPU resources by moving data on high performance FICON channels.
For additional information on INNOVATION solutions, go here.