2021 was an interesting year and, with 2022 well underway, I am looking forward to the new challenges that 2022 may bring. I am now just over 20 months into my role as WW Product Manager for the IBM TS7700 Enterprise Virtual Tape Library. We have made tremendous progress over the past 20 months introducing new performance aspects, smarter solutions, and improved functionality. These include better data resiliency with advanced LWORM functionality, Dual Control Security Authentication, enhancements around our industry leading Transparent Cloud Tiering solution, improvements in capacity and improved data resiliency within the TS7700 grid…. and just this past summer we introduced the first all flash cache for the TS7770 family.
Throughout these enhancements our number one focus is the customer and Integration by Design between the IBM Z, DS8900 and the TS7700. IBM continues to deliver THE trusted solution for mission critical hybrid multicloud environments with the TS7700 being the foundation for this architecture, delivering extra tiers for data, performing the Backup and Restore functionality and finally acting as the Archive component for the IBM Z environment. Integration by design, a unified solution consisting of the TS7700, DS8K and IBM Z, all working as one cohesive solution to deliver the customer everything from compute to storage to DR to data management for their structured and unstructured IBM Z data needs.
Many people would be surprised that the IBM Z is not only alive and well, but thriving and gaining new customers every day. Combined with IBM Z and the DS8900, the TS7700 supports 80% of the world’s structured data, 30 billion transactions per day, backup, and archiving for 9 of the top 10 insurers and 19 of the top 20 banks. No wonder it is still the most trusted Enterprise Virtual Tape Library in the world.
Now let’s get back to unstructured data. I am pleased to announce two exciting new enhancements to the TS7700 environment. The first came late last year in December of 2021 when we announced the new TS7700 Advanced Object Store for DS8000. This is transparent cloud tiering for unstructured/object store data for the IBM Z that has full TS7700 grid synchronous and asynchronous replication support. This enables our IBM Z customers to significantly lower their overall storage costs by seamlessly moving warm or cold object store data to their TS7700 cluster/grid. With secure data compression, the solution can now store 3x more data in the same physical space, reduce CAPEX by 55% and Reduce OPEX (over 3-years) by up to 44%.
In addition, on Jan 27th the IBM TS7700 team has announced support for the TS1160 drives within the TS4500. The TS1160 Enterprise Tape drive delivers Up to 20 TB native capacity. With the industry leading TS7700 ZSTD compression, up to 100TB or more of host content can be stored on one cartridge. The TS4500 Tape Library with TS1160 drives you can now store over 1 EB of compressed data per 18-frame library and up to 39 PB compressed in a 10-sq-ft library. Please contact your local IBM Storage seller or IBM Business Partner for the details. We anticipate the end of March 2022 for general availability.
This brings me to my last point. I want to give a shout out to the entire IBM TS7700 team. Most are in Tucson, Guadalajara and Tokyo with the rest of us spread out around the world. We are made up of hardware and software developers, testers, architects, program, project and product managers and a whole lot more. I was lucky enough to meet with most of the Tucson team this past December to celebrate the release of our latest new solution (mentioned above) as well as say goodbye to 2021 and hello to 2022. Thanks everyone. #IBM, #IBMstorage.
I look forward to getting out to Guadalajara and Tokyo next year to meet the teams there.