May 9 - Virtual Tape announcements

I know, it's a complete arbitrary split-up I make of the announcements of last Monday, but here's the third and last post I'll be spending on this. There's more, I know, but there are other people who can do a far better job in talking you through all the open systems 'only' announcements.

I just want to spend a few moments on the new version of the TS7700 Virtualization Engine (ZG11-0079) and give you some information on the evolution of ProtecTIER (ZG11-0082, ZP11-0203 and ZP11-0200).

For the TS7700 Virtualization Engine there's the new IBM Virtualization Engine TS7720 Server model VEB and the IBM Virtualization Engine TS7740 Server model V07. Some specifications :

• New IBM Power 7 Based server
  
• Up to two million logical volumes per grid domain
• Four active 1Gb Ethernet links for Grid Communications
• Selective Device Access Control restricting access for defined volume ranges to specified device addresses
• 8Gb Fibre Channel interfaces for connections to Tape Volume Cache disk arrays and to the switches supporting back-end physical tape drives
• Two longwave Ethernet links for Grid Communications (only available on TS7720 Server model VEB and TS7740 Server model V07).

Just as a reminder : the TS7720 is the tapeless version. "Four to sixteen 3592 tape drives in a TS3500 Tape Library must be attached to the TS7740 Virtualization Engine through specified fibre channel switches".

Planned availability is June 3, 2011.

The ProtecTIER deduplication solutions evolve from a many-to-one to a many-to-many replication. It "introduces support for many-to-many, bi-directional replication between two to four VTL ProtecTIER systems" in order to allow for gridding across data centers.

Planned availability is also June 3, 2011.

And just to set the records straight : the TS7700 is a mainframe solution which cannot be connected to open systems, the ProtecTIER announcements are only for open systems. The TS7680 ProtecTIER Deduplication Gateway for System z is not mentioned in these announcements.