VTL, Mainfame Backup Back in Storage News at EMC

Here’s a topic you don’t see every day in the IT trade press–or in any press, come to think of it: Virtual tape backup for mainframes.

Oh yes. This is still big business with little ballyhoo. EMC the other day came out with its next-generation mainframe virtual tape library for IBM z/OS machines. Yep, even those Big Hunks, with all their capacity, have to have some sort of backup system.

EMC claims that the DLm6000 is the industry’s fastest mainframe VTL with twice the performance of its nearest competitor, but as most people know, VTLs aren’t the world’s fastest storage devices to begin with. There are still some real turtles on the market, too.

The DLm6000 apparently isn’t one of them. It works hand-in-hand with EMC’s highly virtualized Data Domain and VNX storage systems. But its main value is that it is the only VTL that can handle a full range of mainframe tape workloads within a single all-disk system. Name the workload, this thing can back it up.

This VTL is smart, too. It matches different workloads to the most appropriate storage tier, which could be primary, Tier 2 Serial ATA or Tier 3 archive tape or VTL.

Besides backup and recovery, use cases for the DLm6000 include deduplication storage, batch processing and DFHSM migration.

Other features: About 2GB per second throughput; logical capacity scales to 5.7PB; z/OS console support centralizes platform management; integrated system reduces footprint, power and cooling requirements.

It’s available in September, EMC said.