Gain more value from your mainframe data with IBM Storage
Every year the amount of data that is created continues to expand. Analysts at IDC estimate that data will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23 percent through the year 2025. Furthermore, efficient access to critical business data can mean the difference between success and failure, yet we sometimes forget about the crucial role that storage systems play in our everyday business transactions.
While storage systems have gotten more intelligent and fault-tolerant over the years, there’s always room for advances that can deliver an improved user experience. This can be seen by IBM’s latest storage announcements. The announcement highlights new and improved storage capabilities including cloud-like consumption models, data resiliency, and mainframe storage. This post will focus on the mainframe aspects of the announcement.
Why mainframe? Well, the platform continues to prosper and grow. According to the latest BMC Mainframe Survey, 90 percent of the IT leaders surveyed see the mainframe as a long-term platform for growth. The world’s largest organizations rely on the mainframe to deliver superior performance, reliability, and security. Mainframes are being used not just for traditional transaction processing and batch workloads, but also for new workloads running business analytics and AI applications on structured data. Not to mention that these large shops store most of their data on the mainframe!
What’s New
On July 20, 2021, IBM announced the next generation of its Storage for the IBM Z, the IBM DS8980F analytics class storage system. Engineered to excel for modern workloads that span transaction processing, analytical processing, and AI for native cloud and on-premises computing. The DS8980F offers high-speed and high availability as a single all-flash storage solution.
As part of this announcement, IBM is introducing improvements in Safeguarded Copy to the entire family of IBM DS8900F systems – including DS8910F, DS8950F and the new DS8980F – to greatly reduce the recovery time from a remote location to the production environment. Additionally, IBM is bringing the Safeguarded Copy function in IBM Spectrum Virtualize software to the IBM FlashSystem family and IBM SAN Volume Controller.
Bringing the focus back to the mainframe: the new IBM DS8980F
storage system has been developed by IBM with its z15 mainframe hardware in
mind. That means it is optimized for mainframe-class workloads. Organizations
are continually looking for ways to improve the performance of their mainframe
applications, and the DS8980F provides the fastest mainframe application
response times. Therefore, a key method of improving performance can be to
upgrade your storage system. Indeed, the new IBM DS8980F, compared to the last
generation of IBM storage systems (DS8888F series), can improve response time
by up to 25 percent.
Minimizing downtime is another critical requirement of
modern business applications, especially for those that run on mainframes. The
new IBM DS8980F delivers 7 nines of availability (99.99999 percent), an improvement of
10x over the previous generation.
Additional improvements include more than twice the amount
of system cache and greater bandwidth capacity, all while requiring less energy
consumption and in a lighter-weight box.
At the same time, IBM also announced a new tape library
system, the IBM
TS7770, with all flash cache. The
most significant new feature of the TS7770 is that it provides better
performance with only 1 flash drawer than the previous 10 SAS HDDs drawers, delivering
faster data protection with less infrastructure.
Finally, it is possible to combine the TS7770 tape library
and the IBM DS8910F (the entry version
within the DS8900F family) into a single 19-inch industry-standard rack. This
enables smaller and medium-sized organizations to deploy an end to end storage
solution for mainframe environments, into a smaller amount of floor space with
important savings in operating costs.
Summary
Data growth continues unabated, and organizations continue
to use mainframes expecting them to deliver unparalleled performance and
availability for their mission-critical workloads of all types.
To achieve this level
of performance and availability, while managing data growth, organizations need the
latest and greatest storage technology. And IBM’s latest DS8980F and TS7770
will help organizations achieve the performance and availability they require
for all their application workloads.
If you’d like to learn more about the latest from IBM
storage, you can read the full details in the IBM announcement.
