EMC VTL for Mainframes
Up to 2,048 emulated drives
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on August 7, 2012 at 3:14 pmEMC Corporation announced the DLm8000, a product for large enterprise mainframe environments.
It is a mainframe VTL that ensures consistency between tape data at both production and recovery sites, providing short RPO and RTO for critical recovery operations. With support for EMC VMAX enterprise storage and Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) replication, the DLm8000 rounds out EMC’s portfolio of mainframe VTL offerings with a solution geared to the needs of mission critical environments.
Consistency of tape data between production and recovery sites is particularly desirable for large, transaction-oriented enterprises such as banking, brokerage and insurance companies, where disaster recovery with predictable RTOs is a must. Physical tape transportation by third party records management companies hinders recovery efforts by reducing the granularity of RPOs and increasing the RTO. In addition, periodic lack of tape drive availability for batch processing, archive and backup applications can impair SLAs, further increasing the risks and business impact associated with unplanned service interruptions.
The DLm8000 addresses these challenges, while integrating technologies from EMC into a massively scalable, high performance and highly available solution that helps mainframe users gain control over their tape processes and meet their recovery SLAs.
Available for the first time in the EMC Disk Library for mainframe, VMAX is the storage platform for mission critical mainframe environments where customers require performance in addition to securing and protecting their information. SRDF is the ‘standard’ for remote replication, providing the maximum levels of availability in DR situations. The DLm8000 with VMAX provides performance and availability for both disk storage and tape data. Together, these solutions enable mainframe customers with consistent and automated DR for both disk and tape data.
DLm8000 Product Highlights
- Throughput of up to 2.7 GB/s delivers 2.5x the performance of the nearest competitor.
- Continuous replication to the DR site means data is immediately available to provide rapid RTOs and more flexible RPOs.
- Up to 2,048 emulated drives can be allocated to different processes, even temporarily, to improve overall system processing capabilities.
- Reliability levels that meet the mission critical needs of large mainframe environments, while enabling enhanced data recovery processes.
Ray Lucchesi, president, Silverton Consulting, said: "Large financial organizations with high transactional volume have historically faced recovery challenges because their mainframe tape and DASD data at production and secondary sites were never fully in synch. As such, recovery procedures were often held up until the differences between the two data types were resolved resulting in longer failover time frames. The EMC DLm8000 offers an innovative solution to these challenges that can help these enterprises align their recoveries to their desired RTOs."
Shane Jackson, VP of Marketing, EMC Backup Recovery Systems Division, said: "The ability to replicate tape data synchronously has been in high demand from large enterprise mainframe users, but thus far they have been forced to accept sub-optimal recovery options in an effort to approach their desired SLAs. With the introduction of the DLm8000, EMC becomes the first to solve this problem for our customers. They can now confidently deploy synchronous replication and industry-leading VMAX storage systems integrated into a single solution. The DLm8000 enables these users to consistently achieve their recovery objectives and remove physical tape and its associated problems from their mainframe environments."
EMC Global Services can enhance the effectiveness of DLm8000 deployments and help customers optimize the performance, reliability and efficiency of their environments. Service offerings include infrastructure assessments that provide recommendations for stabilizing and maximizing the effectiveness of the current environment, as well as a range of other services that help organizations transform their IT operations and increase business agility.
The DLm8000 will be available in Q4.
Comments
EMC is and wants to be the leader of the worldwide storage industry but never invested in storage components like HDDs, SSDs or tape that are essential for storage subsystems that the company sells with its software.
Why this strategy since the inception of the firm? The manufacturing of these types of devices needs technologies with deep R&D and EMC knows about nothing about them. Furthermore, producing these components is an activity with small margins.
Consequently it prefers to buy them to vendors including Hitachi GST/WD, Seagate or Micron for HDDs and SSDs. EMC was also a long-term partner of Quantum for tapes and their libraries.
Remember that when the giant wanted to get de-dupe, it hesitates between Data Domain and Quantum and finally preferred the first one in de-dupe only rather than the second one offering de-dupe AND tape.
EMC hates magnetic tapes: too slow, too expansive and complicated robotics. The company finally did a good choice as VTL and D2D, based on HDDs only, are progressively replacing tapes and are now the preferred choice of end users for backup, if not for long-term archiving.
The company is already involved in lower-end VTLs: DLm 1000 with Data Domain de-dupe, mid-range DLm2000 and DLm6000.
With this new DLm8000 up to 1.7PB, and the help of acquired firm Bus-Tech, specialized in high-end VTLs, EMC wants also to kill tape subsystems for mainframes, attacking directly the two leaders in these high-end tape solutions based on z/OS and Ficon attachment, IBM and Oracle/StorageTek.
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