- Good Things Come in Small Packages
By Jim O’Connor, Senior Product Marketing Manager, EMC Backup Recovery Systems
Virtual Tape Libraries have forever changed the landscape in mainframe tape operations. High-performance VTLs can shrink backup and restore times, reduce storage and replication requirements, improve RPO and RTO, eliminate drive contention, prevent lost tapes, and reduce the possibility of damaged tape media by storing data on RAID protected disk.
However one of the biggest advantages over tape is the minimized foot print in the data center, saving floor space costs, power, air conditioning and more.
The EMC DLm2000 Virtual Tape Library for mainframe environments delivers all of this functionality in a single data center floor tile. One customer reports a 95% reduction in floor space and a 75% reduction in power consumption.
Don’t let the small package mislead you, the EMC DLm2000 provides:
- Up to 680 MB/sec throughput for faster backup and restore times
- Up to 680 MB/sec throughput for faster backup and restore times
- Hardware compression that reduces data size by a factor of up to 4 to 1, which minimizes storage and replication requirements
- 512 virtual drives to eliminate drive contention
- Data replication to a DR site, eliminating the possibility of lost or stolen tapes and providing an improved Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
The powerful EMC DLm2000 is an ideal alternative to mainframe tape systems for small to mid-sized mainframe data centers. A fully configured DLm2000 can store the equivalent of over 175,000 full 3490E tape cartridges. Just imagine the reduced costs of storing that many tapes and the personnel costs to manage them.
With the DLm2000 it’s also no longer necessary to send hundreds of tape cartridges and personnel to the DR site for testing readiness; you can do it from your desktop. The Disk Library for mainframe has allowed some companies to say that, for the first time they have complete confidence in their ability to recover from an unexpected outage.
When it comes to mainframe tape processing – size DOES matter.
Using traditional tape or even VTL based enoirvnments, this is relatively easy to do but with a snap-based environment; this will be a lot harder, not impossible but it actually adds complexity. I'm not sure I understand this comment at all, especially in reference to NetApp (since that's the example you used). So lets talk about SnapManager for SQL and FlexClone + other specific application SnapManagers to provide exactly this simple, quick and easy with the option to create multiple copies as incrementals (and minimal capacity utilised), or if required, create a whole new copy, on same/seperate disk, or even seperate array. First two are much quicker than any (B/U) restore function and is wizard based. I don't know how much simpler this gets ???Are you completely unaware of these tools? It's not just koolaid my customers use it.And yes, if you wanted to keep all (B/U) copies on disk then NetApp with application consistent snapshots are indeed good enough for a backup strategy. Again I have customers doing this and are very happy. To clarify, I do not suggest and neither does anyone else I know, that the initial snapshot (on the same array, on the same disk) as a complete backup strategy this is foolish. I do however have to concur with the vendor lock-in comment.
- Kurniawant, April 5, 2012 at 7:23 pm