IBM TS7700 Release 5.1 Guide

This IBM® Redbooks® publication covers IBM TS7700 R5.1. The IBM TS7700 is part of a family of IBM Enterprise tape products. This book is intended for system architects and storage administrators who want to integrate their storage systems for optimal operation. Building on over 20 years of virtual tape experience, the TS7770 supports the ability to store virtual tape volumes in an object store. The TS7700 supported off loading to physical tape for over two decades. Off loading to physical tape behind a TS7700 is utilized by hundreds of organizations around the world. By using the same hierarchical storage techniques, the TS7700 (TS7770 and TS7760) can also off load to object storage. Because object storage is cloud-based and accessible from different regions, the TS7700 Cloud Storage Tier support essentially allows the cloud to be an extension of the grid. As of this writing, the TS7700C supports the ability to off load to IBM Cloud® Object Storage and Amazon S3. This publication explains features and concepts that are specific to the IBM TS7700 as of release R5.1. The R5.1 microcode level provides IBM TS7700 Cloud Storage Tier enhancements, IBM DS8000® Object Storage enhancements, Management Interface dual control security, and other smaller enhancements. The R5.1 microcode level can be installed on the IBM TS7770 and IBM TS7760 models only. TS7700 provides tape virtualization for the IBM z environment. Tape virtualization can help satisfy the following requirements in a data processing environment: Improved reliability and resiliency Reduction in the time that is needed for the backup and restore process Reduction of services downtime that is caused by physical tape drive and library outages Reduction in cost, time, and complexity by moving primary workloads to virtual tape Increased efficient procedures for managing daily batch, backup, recall, and restore processing On-premises and off-premises object store cloud storage support as an alternative to physical tape for archive and disaster recovery New and existing capabilities of the TS7700 5.1 include the following highlights: Eight-way Grid Cloud, which consists of up to three generations of TS7700 Synchronous and asynchronous replication Full AES256 encryption for replication data that is in-flight and at-rest Tight integration with IBM Z and DFSMS policy management Optional target for DS8000 Transparent Cloud Tier using DFSMS DS8000 Object Store AES256 in-flight encryption and compression Optional Cloud Storage Tier support for archive and disaster recovery 16 Gb IBM FICON® throughput up to 5 GBps per TS7700 cluster IBM Z hosts view up to 3,968 common devices per TS7700 grid Grid access to all data independent of where it exists TS7770 Cache On-demand feature that is based capacity licensing TS7770 support of SSD within the VED server The TS7700T writes data by policy to physical tape through attachment to high-capacity, high-performance IBM TS1150, and IBM TS1140 tape drives that are installed in an IBM TS4500 or TS3500 tape library. The TS7770 models are based on high-performance and redundant IBM POWER9TM technology. They provide improved performance for most IBM Z tape workloads when compared to the previous generations of IBM TS7700.