Originally posted by: TonyPearson
Continuing my drawn out coverage of IBM's big storage launch of February 9, today I'll cover the IBM System Storage TS7680 ProtecTIER data deduplication gateway for System z.
On the host side, TS7680 connects to mainframe systems running z/OS or z/VM over FICON attachment, emulating an automated tape library with 3592-J1A devices. The TS7680 includes two controllers that emulate the 3592 C06 model, with 4 FICON ports each. Each controller emulates up to 128 virtual 3592 tape drives, for a total of 256 virtual drives per TS7680 system. The mainframe sees up to 1 million virtual tape cartridges, up to 100GB raw capacity each, before compression. For z/OS, the automated library has full SMS Tape and Integrated Library Management capability that you would expect.
Inside, the two control units are both connected to a redundant pair cluster of ProtecTIER engines running the HyperFactor deduplication algorithm that is able to process the deduplication inline, as data is ingested, rather than post-process that other deduplication solutions use. These engines are similar to the TS7650 gateway machines for distributed systems.
On the back end, these ProtecTIER deduplication engines are then connected to external disk, up to 1PB. If you get 25x data deduplication ratio on your data, that would be 25PB of mainframe data stored on only 1PB of physical disk. The disk can be any disk supported by ProtecTIER over FCP protocol, not just the IBM System Storage DS8000, but also the IBM DS4000, DS5000 or IBM XIV storage system, various models of EMC and HDS, and of course the IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) with all of its supported disk systems.
Here is the [
Announcement Letter]
technorati tags: ts7680, z/OS, z/VM, FICON, 3592-J1A, SMS Tape, TS7650, ProtecTIER, mainframe, FCP, DS8000, DS5000, DS4000, XIV, SVC