IBM TS7700 R4.0 Virtualized Tape Storage Delivers Faster Performance and Larger Capacity

TS7700 R4.0 delivers faster performance and larger maximum capacity with the new TS7760 offering to support business in the cloud

With cloud infrastructures on the rise and data volumes expanding exponentially, organizations need a cost-effective way to manage both primary and backup data that is active, inactive, or even archived.

Long-term retention of data is a business priority, as is continuous availability from anywhere at any time, but the storage solution must also fit within today’s budget constraints. Storing infrequently accessed data on costly disk storage simply doesn’t make sense.

At the same time, physical tape libraries can require long access times and high administrative requirements, making the use cost-prohibitive in transactional storage infrastructures.

TS7700 virtualized tape storage delivers a solution to all of these issues.

TS7700 Release 4.0 introduces the TS7760 offering which combines and replaces the previous TS7720 and TS7740 offerings.

POWER8 processor technology
TS7760 Model VEC features IBM POWER8 server technology to help support high performance. Model VEC delivers performance improvements over POWER7-based TS7720 and TS7740 server models.

DDP
The TS7760 repository is formatted with DDP. The dynamic RAID functionality of DDP supports higher availability and faster rebuild times than the RAID-5 and RAID-6 protection used on previous TS7700 repositories.

Increased capacity
TS7760 Tape Controller Model CSA and TS7760 Cache Module Model XSA support an increase of more than 30% of the maximum capacity for a TS7700 cluster, compared to the maximum capacity of the previous TS7720 cluster.

TS4500 Tape Library
TS7700 R4.0 supports the TS4500 Tape Library as a physical tape automation platform. The TS3500 Tape Library is also supported. When connecting a TS7760 Server Model VEC with a TS3500 or TS4500 Tape Library, 16GB FC switches are required.

Key prerequisites

TS7700 servers attach to FICON channels on select System z servers and require the appropriate levels of System z software.
TS7700 R4.0 requires a minimum of 32GB RAM. Memory Upgrade feature number 3462 is required on TS7720 Server Model VEB and TS7740 Server Model V07 before R4.0 machine code can be installed.
16Gb FC switches are required when connecting TS7760 Model VEC with a TS3500 or TS4500 Tape Library.
Additional features may be required on the TS7760 components or automation frames.

Planned availability date:

June 3, 2016: All models and features except feature number 9339 for 3952-F06
August 19, 2016: Feature number 9339