New IBM Storage Systems Boost Ability to Gain Value from Your Mainframe Data

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.