Since the time z/OS DFSMS and DS8000 announced support for transparent cloud tiering, there has been widespread interest in the functional capabilities, but limited exploitation of cloud object storage in mainframe environments. Clients routinely express their desire to have the DS8000 transparent cloud tiering capabilities apply directly to the migration of data between their existing enterprise disk and virtual tape devices. IBM DS8000 and TS7700 have announced a proprietary solution to provide this evolutionary capability.
The new TS7700 DS8000 object store capability enables DFSMShsm DS8000 transparent cloud tiering migration requests to target a TS7700 through existing GRID interfaces. Within the TS7700, the DS8000 object data is logically partitioned out of the existing resident cache. This object data is managed separately from traditional FICON logical volume data that coexists within the same physical TS7700 cluster. DFSMShsm manages the TS7700 DS8000 object store data identically to classic cloud object storage data.
This capability enables automated, policy-driven DFSMShsm migration and recall processing to move data through your entire traditional storage hierarchy with none of the data passing through your Z server! Besides the obvious advantage of eliminating host CPU for data movement, it also eliminates recycle processing. These efficiencies create a foundation for exciting new storage management capabilities that were not previously possible.
Additional information will become available when the function becomes generally available at the end of 2019.
TS7700 R5.0 Announcement for DS8000 Object Store
Transparent Cloud Tiering Redbook