Today, Sun made available the most significant set of enhancements to the mainframe virtual tape market since this market began in 1998 by StorageTek and IBM.

In 1998, StorageTek made available its first Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) system that leveraged the well structured Hierarchical Storage Manager and Tape Management System software that customers already had in place. At that time VSM was a system that would accelerate tape processing by having a disk buffer virtualize a physical tape drive. StorageTek also provided virtual tape management software that allowed for migrations of one or more of the virtual tape volumes from the disk buffer onto physical tape – the most cost effective data storage even today.

Fast forward 11 years. What has changed? The basic principles of tape virtualization are the same but what has evolved is from a business perspective. Primarily driven by ever changing customer requirements, changes in regulatory requirements, and the ever increasing amount of data that must be stored and protected for very long periods of time.

VSM has evolved to meet these ever changing requirements. Today's availability of the new VSM5 enhancements and Enterprise Library Software (ELS) keeps VSM in the technological lead by providing a broader range of solutions that solve real problems. The following are some of the enhancements that are now available:

1. DR has been enhanced in two very important areas. Sun’s clustering capability has been improved by 100%. Now up to 4 VSM subsystems can exist within the same clustered environment. These are all under one central point of control and provide tremendously more flexibility when configuring for high availability when a disaster occurs. In addition, data can now be electronically exported and imported to other VSM controlled tapeplexes. These improvements compliment the VSM disaster recovery choices that have been industry leading in the mainframe virtual tape market for many years.
2. Configuration flexibility has been improved. No other vendor provides the option to have or not have physical tape automation attached to the same virtual tape environment. This implementation provides the ability to selectively use physical tape automation. For example you could keep your data in a local VSM buffer and selectively migrate data to a remote VSM environment that does have tape automation attached. This is all managed by VSM which can dramatically reduce the complexity of tape operations and drive down the overall cost of storage.
3. Larger disk buffers allow for more data to be kept on disk longer prior to being migrated to tape. As the amount of data grows and data access frequency patterns change more data needs to remain on disk. VSM already provided from 1.25TB to 28TBs of effective disk storage within each VSM5 subsystem. Today, VSM5 buffer sizes can now be over three times larger going up to 90TBs. You should be able to find the size that fits your requirements to optimize the data migration and recall activity within your integrated virtual tape library environment.
4. Now adding ESCON channels to VSM5. If the ESCON channel protocol is still critical to your mainframe environment Sun is now providing you ESCON channels to be attached to its latest and greatest VSM5 solution. Sun is the only vendor to provide ESCON for their virtual tape library offering and also provides the choice of having a mixture of ESCON/FICON channels. If you have not fully implemented FICON across your mainframe environment this option allows you to do so within stages and leverages the latest set of VSM5 functions and features.
5. New native IP connectivity option. Sun is even providing you with the option to utilize your intranet backbone network between your sites in addition to the specialized ESCON or FICON extended channel protocols. So if your TCP/IP network has additional bandwidth, why not exploit that bandwidth with your mainframe VSM solution?

What does all of this mean? Sun understands what you need in your mainframe virtual tape environment and now provides you with additional choices that can leverage your existing infrastructure. Now you can scale from smaller to larger environments. At the same time providing you with ways to minimize the risks to your data and lower your costs by providing more channel interface flexibility, larger disk buffers, and enhanced DR capabilities.

If you wish to receive more information on what was made available today let me know and I would be pleased to discuss this with you further.