Tape Storage

IT technology is moving at an unprecedented rate; IT enterprises look for flexibility while committing to a solution to adapt to current or future changes in their requirements. IBM TS7700 Virtualization Engine identified 3 different ways to solve this need by offering a smaller footprint on prepacked racked solutions, pay-per-use, and capacity on demand.

IBM TS7700 offers a smaller footprint and lower entry cost option, as well as flexible deployments designed for organizations of different sizes with different needs by leveraging the 19in. rack mainframe packaging. Customers can either purchase the TS7770 as a prepackaged racked solution or insert a new TS7770 system into their own industry-standard 19in. racks. For small and medium-sized businesses, TS7770 provides the performance, capacity, and security (with its ability to support end-to-end encryption) needed for mission-critical workloads on IBM Z series mainframes (including the latest z15), supporting both physical air-gap protection (to address corruption and malware concerns) and an attractive entry point (20TB capacity uncompressed).

Today, pay-per-use is the preferred storage resources payment model—more than three-quarters (76%) of IT organizations are procuring at least some on-premises storage capacity in this manner at present according to ESG research.¹ IBM Storage Utility from IBM brings together dynamic, pay-for-use consumption with leading business continuity and agility, allowing you to dynamically activate one or more resources on your private server as your business peaks dictate. IBM has long been a leader in providing flexible capacity, making it easy for you to scale up by temporarily or permanently activating dormant processor capacity and memory resources within your system.

With the release of the latest model, enterprises can deploy into their business strategy the introduction of IBM TS7700 storage utility feature to enable users to pay only for the storage actually used. TS7700 also offers a pay as your grow model so that you can introduce the benefits of the TS7700 at a much lower price point than a typical lease or purchase.

TS7700 offers the flexibility of IBM Storage Utility offering to managed service providers (MSP) and cloud service providers (CSP) for dynamic, pay-for-use consumption. TS7770 is an opportunity to provide end-to-end solutions and sell services and software to enhance the current functionality or complement the solutions already implemented. IBM TS7770 gives competitive advantages to our partners proposals being an excellent “add-on” offering to DS8900F or IBM Z sales, increasing channel partner deal size and profit. Its flexibility supporting the storage utility and the latest 19-inch customed client rack are a door opening on mid-range client proposals. Its seamless integration to cloud is key for managed service providers and cloud service providers, as it allows TS7770 to act as an object store for Transparent Cloud Tiering to provide direct, server-less data transfers from the TS7770 to the cloud, whether that is IBM Cloud, Amazon S3, or IBM Cloud Object Storage. 

TS7700 also offers Capacity on Demand (COD) to allow users to enable acquired disk capacity directly on the web-based management tool. The COD can be enabled concurrently from just 20 TB up to 780 TB on the base frame, 2.36 PB with one expansion frame, and 3.94 PB with two expansion frames. A similar Cache-on-Demand feature based on capacity licensing is also available. TS7700 family has the ability to increase capacity in 20 TB and 100 TB increments concurrently on the new TS7770 cache subsystem using larger 10 TB 7.2K SAS Drives with 157TB usable capacity per drawer pair. The TS7770 delivers up to 2.36 PB with one expansion frame and 3.94 PB with two expansion frames.

In this era of digitalization, it is key to enable clients and BP's to access their key information online. For this reason, the TS7700 provided a mechanism for customers to retrieve activation feature codes digitally after a product order is placed via the Entitled Systems Support (ESS) platform².

IBM TS7700 is the leader in disaster recovery for IBM Z mainframe environments. Its virtualization engine provides unique capabilities that are specifically tied to how z/OS operates and how typical tape workloads operate. Find out more and strengthen your solutions with IBM TS7700 Virtual Tape library here.

¹ ESG Technical Validation, Maximizing performance and security of IBM Z replication solutions, September 2020

² ESS Web: https://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/ess/index.wss