IBM TS7720 Supporting Physical Tape Attachment

IBM TS7700 Release 3.2 supports options to attach back-end physical tape drives in a TS3500 library to a TS7720, and policies to manage up to eight separate partitions of the disk repository in a tape-attached TS7720.

Users have the ability to direct different workloads to these partitions to address the needs of their business. Release 3.2 also supports logical volume sizes up to 25GB.

Key prerequisites

• A TS7700 server attaches to FICON channels on select System z servers with the appropriate levels of System z software. The host FICON channels must be capable of communicating at 2Gb/s, 4Gb/s, or 8 Gb/s. A minimum of 32GB RAM is required in the TS7700 server when 8Gb FICON adapters are installed.
• Four to sixteen 3592 tape drives in a TS3500 tape library must be attached to the TS7720 system with the tape attachment option enabled and to the TS7740 system through specified FC switches. Additional features may be required on the TS7700 components or tape library automation frames.
• TS7700 R3.2 machine code can only be installed on a TS7720 model VEB and TS7740 model V07. R3.2 machine code is not compatible with previous generation of TS7700 server models.

Planned availability date: December 5, 2014