Radoslaw Skorupka wrote: >IBM released new tape drive TS1160. >20TB/60TB capacity, up to 400/900MB/s data >transfer, dual 16Gbps interface. >You can attach it to your Windows server, or >Linux (x64), but mainframe >is excluded, no FICON attachment.
I think you might have missed the last 10+ years. :-) IBM has not shipped *any* IBM tape *drives* that attach to mainframes using FICON for many, many years now. Even the non-virtualized tape controllers, which did attach to mainframes via FICON (thence to IBM tape drives via FCP), are now historical. The last model in the IBM non-virtualized tape controller line was the IBM 3592-C07, which is still IBM supported but no longer marketed. There are approximately three modern ways to attach IBM tape drives to mainframes: 1. Through Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) attachment directly to IBM mainframes, which Linux on Z and LinuxONE supports. This attachment is classic, "pure physical." 2. Through IBM TS7700 series virtual tape libraries, which can be optionally "backed" with tape libraries and tape drives, *currently* IBM TS4500 libraries with IBM TS1150 drives (or prior). The IBM announcement letter for the IBM TS1160 includes the important word "currently" not available for TS7700 configurations. (I would also point out that the JE tape media for IBM TS1160 tape drives won't be available for a few months, so it's not yet possible to write 20 TB tape cartridges.) This attachment is virtual, or as a "smart" controller if you prefer to think of it that way. Modern z/OS has fully graduated to virtual attachment, at least. Just as we no longer deal with physical 3390 volumes with direct correspondence to tracks, cylinders, and the rest, so too tape has fully virtualized for/with z/OS. This is a good thing! 3. Through cloud attachment, specifically for z/OS using the IBM Cloud Tape Connector for z/OS. Version 2.1 was also announced very recently: https://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/3/897/ENUS218-493/ENUS218-493.PDF Cloud Tape Connector for z/OS allows you to connect everything z/OS tape-related (and "tape"-related) to any cloud object storage that supports any of these standard interfaces: IBM Cloud Object Storage, Amazon S3, Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), or EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS), most of which in turn can be backed with physical tape libraries, tape drives, and tape cartridges. You can think of this approach as "hyper virtual" or at least "double virtual" if you like. It's a little bit of a mind bender if you're not familiar with the concepts yet, but it's well worth exploring, especially if you have a lot of data to manage. For example, the tape libraries and tape drives (and standard interfaces in front of them) might not be yours, or even in your data center(s), all the while z/OS "sees" lots of tape. The IBM DS8880 series of enterprise storage units also support cloud object storage in coordinated fashion with z/OS DFSMShsm, which is also extremely clever and cool IMHO. And all of this works beautifully with z/OS Data Set Encryption enabled. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples IT Architect Executive, Industry Solutions, IBM Z & LinuxONE, Multi-Geography E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
