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With over 3,000 patents issued or in process,[1] IBM z15 represents the result of 4 years of technological development. This week, IBM Z is announcing enhancements on cloud native development and deployment, encryption everywhere, cyber resilience and flexible compute. This powerful current of innovation is consistently followed by IBM DS8900F and IBM TS7770 and is reflected in the new enhancements within both storage families announced today.

“The basic mainframe approach to data processing fits exceptionally well with modern workloads such as artificial intelligence and real-time analytics,” notes Mark Tansey, Storage Solutions Sales Director for long-time IBM Business Partner Vicom Infinity. “We see a strong future for mainframe deployment and sales. This means that we must provide our clients with complementary data storage solutions that offer equal levels of performance, reliability, and security. IBM DS8900F and TS7700 VTL systems fill the bill perfectly.”

Built with advanced storage technologies, the IBM DS8900F family benefits from years of research and deep collaboration between the IBM Storage and IBM Z teams to deliver business value for mainframe deployments. Announced today, the memory cache in the IBM DS8950F storage solution is increased by 70 percent to a whopping 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 percent and OPEX over a 3-year period by 91 percent while continuing to meet performance service-level agreements (SLAs).

In addition, IBM continues to provide high levels of synergy with 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 your mainframe environments in a single 19-inch industry standard rack.

Along with increases in performance and efficiency within the DS8900F family itself, today IBM Storage is also announcing multiple enhancements to the way IBM DS8900F and TS7770 systems work together with the goal of accelerating mainframe-driven enterprises. Transparent cloud tiering (TCT) seamlessly 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.^[2]

Additionally, 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. This new feature offers multiple potential benefits:

• The compression engine — and TCT itself — does not affect overall system IOPS
• No additional servers or gateways are needed
• Less network bandwidth is required to move data, helping to increase performance across multicloud environments
• Three times more data can be stored at the target system, potentially reducing CAPEX by 55 percent and OPEX over 3-year period by 44 percent[3]

Data security is another area of enhancement 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 multicloud 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 nicely with new cloud-based disaster recovery capabilities for IBM VTL and tape solutions. Data sets 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.

IBM DS8900F and TS7770 are not the only IBM Storage families that continue to deliver extensive innovation. Today we are announcing SAS interface and Ethernet enhancements to IBM TS1160 tape drives, plus new support of TS1160 drives by IBM TS4500 tape libraries.

“The deep integration between IBM DS8900F, IBM TS7770 and IBM Z offers a number of advantages to mainframe users,” states David Hill, Senior Analyst at Mesabi Group, “but perhaps the most important benefit is simplification. IBM has done a good job in providing a comprehensive portfolio of storage for IBM Z solutions to address every enterprise data storage requirement and meet the demands of a modern, agile and secure to the core infrastructure. This is important to customers since it decreases complexity, reduces costs and they tend to receive better support.”

These new announcements 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 multicloud environments.

Learn more about how IBM Storage innovation can support and accelerate your multicloud mainframe environment.

To learn more about how DS8900F and TS7700 can maximize the power of IBM Z, join the IBM Storage sessions at Share Virtual:
AUG 19 Leveraging Cloud and TS7700 Object Storage: Intro and Usage with DFSMS
AUG 20 The New and Improved DS8900F Storage System Family
AUG 20 Leveraging IBM DS8000 Transparent Cloud Tiering

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