ProtecTIER Solution for mainframe alive and kicking

You might remember that in my post about the End of Marketing of the 3592 C07 Tape Controller, I told you IBM proposed ProtecTIER ME (Mainframe Edition) as a possible replacement. My reaction to this

"Well, I think you can forget about the ProtecTIER ME solution, because as far as I know that one went End of Marketing somewhere in 2012 (ZG12-0339), unless I missed something . . ."

Apparently I did miss something, as Art Tolsma, CEO of Luminex points out to me. here's his comments on this matter.

"Hello Marc,

I noticed your blog posting last week regarding mainframe tape. I have been an avid reader for a long time and appreciate your industry updates and insights.

You wondered whether you had “missed something” with regards to the Protectier ME product mentioned by IBM. As you know IBM discontinued their first attempt at providing a Protectier-based solution to deduplicate mainframe data. However, over the past few years IBM has chosen to partner with Luminex to deliver Protectier for this important mainframe market, and have called it Protectier ME (Mainframe Edition). It uses the indpendent and commercially standard products from both IBM and Luminex without requiring the resources to develop and manage custom solutions. IBM has presented this solution at SHARE on several occasions, and below is one link I found directly from IBM that mentions this, as well as more detailed information available on the Luminex website.

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/InsideSystemStorage/entry/ibm_celebrates_sixth_anniversary_of_ibm_protectier?lang=en

http://www.luminex.com/products/channel_gateway/ibm/protectierme/

Luminex is dedicated to supporting the mainframe customer community and provide options and solutions for data centers of all sizes."

Well, I think that's clear enough. Thanks, Art, for the update.

IBM XIV Storage System Model 214

You must have noticed there weren't a lot of announcements lately. Well, usually that only means that one of those big announcement days is imminent. So, yesterday, next to the previews of z/OS 2.1 and z/VM 6.3 there were also some storage announcements. Two of them were about XIV.

The first one was the hardware announcement of Model 214 (ZG13-0019) which is the third in line after the A14 and the 114 (Gen3). The second one announced the accompanying software version 11.2.0 (ZP13-0018) supporting the new model 214 and the current model 114.

There's not that many new items that were announced. The most important one is that we do not only have just 1Gb Ethernet ports any more. We can now have up to twelve 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports for connecting to iSCSI-attached hosts or twenty-two 1Gb Ethernet ports.

Some other highlights (although most of them are not actually new)

• Up to 15 CPUs providing ninety physical cores (180 logical cores using Intel Hyper-Threading technology)
• More energy-efficient hardware that can reduce power consumption by up to 16% compared to previous models
• Up to 24 x 8Gb FC ports for host connectivity
• Up to 6 TB of SSD cache by using 400 GB drives
• Up to 243 TB of usable capacity
• Up to 360 GB of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) cache

There are some key prerequisites although you'd perhaps better call them limitations.

• Intermixing of port bandwidth between 10GbE and 1Gb within the same system is not supported (mutually exclusive)
• Partially populated IBM XIV Storage Systems that are shipped from the factory with any of the raw capacity per drive options must continue to be populated with the same raw capacity per drive option.
• Intermixing of any of these capacity points options in a single XIV Storage System frame is not allowed: 1 TB, 2 TB, or 3 TB.
• If one module supports SSD caching, then all modules in the system must have SSD.

Planned availability : March 7, 2013.

Next to the XIV, there were also some announcements on ProtecTIER (ZP13-0007, ZP13-0009) and Real-Time Compression (ZP13-0017, ZG13-0018). And as of March 1, 2013 Licensed Machine Code (LMC) R6.2 of the DS8000 (DS8800 and DS8870) is withdrawn and replaced by LMC 6.3 (ZG13-0025).

IBM Systems magazine Mainframe - May/June 2011

Last week there was the May/June issue of the IBM Systems Magazine with some very good content. You can find it over here. I would advise you to subscribe to the magazine. That way you also get a link to the .pdf.

I would like to draw your attention to some articles I really enjoyed reading. There's e.g. 'Beyond Restart and Concurrency' by Carl Feinberg about minimizing "the impact of failures with restartable batch applications" using a systemwide restart facility. Trust me, an interesting read for companies who see an ever decreasing batch window or who no longer draw the line between online and batch executions.

Tami Deedrick writes a good article on ProtecTIER, more specific on the TS7680 ProtecTIER Deduplication Gateway for System z. If the technical arguments don't convince you there's also a financial argument : "Acquisition can be 50 to 80 percent lower than standard virtual tape library solutions, which may help lower total cost of ownership".

Wait, there's more. There's the customer story of our own Brussels based P&V Assurances company that reduces technology costs via VPN-free access. It tells the story how the technology for connecting their agents in the front office evolved from a tightly coupled system to a "platform-agnostic access to back-end systems".

And last but not least, there's a special report with the results of a readers' survey about business challenges, mainframe staffing, adopting new technologies like e.g. cloud computing and their view on hybrid environments.

As I always say, just check it out !

May 9 - Virtual Tape announcements

I know, it's a complete arbitrary split-up I make of the announcements of last Monday, but here's the third and last post I'll be spending on this. There's more, I know, but there are other people who can do a far better job in talking you through all the open systems 'only' announcements.

I just want to spend a few moments on the new version of the TS7700 Virtualization Engine (ZG11-0079) and give you some information on the evolution of ProtecTIER (ZG11-0082, ZP11-0203 and ZP11-0200).

For the TS7700 Virtualization Engine there's the new IBM Virtualization Engine TS7720 Server model VEB and the IBM Virtualization Engine TS7740 Server model V07. Some specifications :

• New IBM Power 7 Based server
  
• Up to two million logical volumes per grid domain
• Four active 1Gb Ethernet links for Grid Communications
• Selective Device Access Control restricting access for defined volume ranges to specified device addresses
• 8Gb Fibre Channel interfaces for connections to Tape Volume Cache disk arrays and to the switches supporting back-end physical tape drives
• Two longwave Ethernet links for Grid Communications (only available on TS7720 Server model VEB and TS7740 Server model V07).

Just as a reminder : the TS7720 is the tapeless version. "Four to sixteen 3592 tape drives in a TS3500 Tape Library must be attached to the TS7740 Virtualization Engine through specified fibre channel switches".

Planned availability is June 3, 2011.

The ProtecTIER deduplication solutions evolve from a many-to-one to a many-to-many replication. It "introduces support for many-to-many, bi-directional replication between two to four VTL ProtecTIER systems" in order to allow for gridding across data centers.

Planned availability is also June 3, 2011.

And just to set the records straight : the TS7700 is a mainframe solution which cannot be connected to open systems, the ProtecTIER announcements are only for open systems. The TS7680 ProtecTIER Deduplication Gateway for System z is not mentioned in these announcements.

Sampling Techdocs - January/March 2011

It's been a while since I've referred to some of the most interesting publications I regularly find on Techdocs. But, here we are once again with a selection.

• FAQ : What are the maximum distances for various FC speeds and cable media?
  Did you know that in the worst case with 8Gbps and 50 µm short-wave cables you can hardly bridge 50m. With 16 Gbps that becomes 35m.
  
  
• Technical document : Identifying the dynamic SQL statement which is causing a lock timeout in DB2 for z/OS
  I mentioned this document before but apparantly it's been updated. At the time it was set up for DB2 V8. It has been updated and it's also valid for newer releases.
  
  
• Presentations : Introduction to ProtecTIER. Concepts of Data Deduplication and Introduction to ProtecTIER - TS7600 Architecture
  If you're revising your backup solutions and you're interested in D2D or D2D2T and you want state of the art deduplication, then you might want to take a look at these two presentations. They give a good overview of ProtecTIER, quite technical at times and there's also a roadmap included.
  

• Presentation : DS8000 PAV and FlashCopy with z/VSE
  There's more to life than just z/OS. Here's a nice presentation on the implementation of PAV on z/VSE. It explains PAV in general and then continues on how to implement it on z/VSE. Do take a good look at the restrictions, though.
  

• Presentation : DS8000 Advanced Functions and z/VM
  "This presentation discusses which DS8000 System z functions are exploited by z/VM. Functions discussed are Parallel Access Volumes (PAVs), FlashCopy, MIDAWs, zHPF, and Extended Address Volumes (EAVs)." Also interesting if you're running e.g. z/VSE as a guest on z/VM.
  

• Flash : IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension Top of Rack Switch (TOR)
  This document starts with an overview of the zBX but goes into greater detail afterwards. It discusses the Bulk Power Heads on the z196, the connectivity for the Intranode Management Network (INMN) and the IntraEnsemble Data Network (IEDN), with some illustrations (always nice to get a visual) and it concludes with lots of reference materials.

Well that's it for now. As I always say : just check them out !

Storage Announcements : XIV and Protectier

This week I already discussed the LTO5 and DS8700 announcements, but there're still some more : XIV and ProtecTIER. As I've already said, I've broadened my horizon a bit and I will also talk about high-end storage which is not always immediately mainframe-related. But we've already seen how thin this line can be. ProtecTIER already has a gateway for the mainframe and behind that you can also have an XIV. Though I must say, the new functionalities for ProtecTIER are open systems only for the moment as it's about the TS7650.

What's the main part of the ProtecTIER announcements (ZP10-0169 and ZP10-0172) ?
It's called many-to-one replication. It's for customers with backup data at multiple data centers, remote offices or multiple office locations. You can have up to twelve primary sites with a ProtecTIER solutions (called spokes) and have one central target (called hub). The twelve spokes replicate their virtual tapes (already deduplicated) to the hub. This hub acts as a Disaster/Recovery solution for all spokes. "It can become a 'primary' for any number of the spokes under disaster while still allowing local backups and replication from other active spokes". And as a picture tells more than a thousand words, here's schematic illustration you can also find when you take a look at the accompanying podcast. You can find the link on the ProtecTIER information page too.

Click on image to see larger version in new window

Planned availability : May 28, 2010

On to XIV with the 2TB drive support (ZP10-0080 and ZP10-0069). This is quite straightforward : it extends the maximum usable capacity from 79TB to 161TB for a full rack with 15 modules. But there's more good news : same footprint but less power consumption compared to a 1TB rack. And performance should remain roughly the same. Some resources : the XIV home page, the XIV fact sheet and the XIV 2TB launch page with some interesting links like customer references, testimonials and an introductory podcast.

Planned availability : April 22, 2010.

ProtecTIER deduplication for mainframe

A couple of weeks ago, with the announcement of Protectier Deduplication for Mainframe, I promised to come back on this. I’ve written an article about it in our RealDolmen System z Newsletter, so I thought I might as well put a slightly reworked version here too. Protectier and XIV are two products IBM bought some time ago to gain market share in the distributed world. So, don’t worry if you haven’t heard a lot about them yet. But now that Protectier is brought to the mainframe environment, it might be time to check out how Protectier can mean something for you too.
I’m going to tell you a little about ProtecTIER, how it works and what advantages this might have for a mainframe client. I’m also going to tell you how it’s connected to the mainframe.

Deduplication Explained

At first sight you can compare the ProtecTIER technology with a tapeless backup solution. It simulates a virtual tape library. And just as the TS7720 Tapeless Virtualization Engine, it writes the data to disk, be it an attached disk system of your own choice. The real value of the ProtecTIER solution lies in its deduplication technology. The illustration below shows you how this is done.

Click on image to see larger version in new window

A word of explanation ? We have three components. The mainframe is connected to the ProtecTIER appliance which in turn is connected to the disk system. An ‘appliance’ is the term which is often used for an integrated complete solution of hardware and software in a rack.

The software used by the ProtecTIER Gateway (server) is called HyperFactor. As you see on the right hand side, some blocks of data have already been written to disk. The Memory Resident Index is used to keep track of the blocks which have been written to disk. You might say that this index contains some kind of key for every block. And as you can gather from the name, this index resides in the internal memory of the ProtecTIER Gateway. The index has a maximum size of 4GB which is large enough to index 1PB of data.

At the upper left side you see some new data blocks which have to be written to the ‘tape library’. They are sent to the ProtecTIER Gateway and the HyperFactor software uses the index to filter out the blocks that have already been written to disk. Because there’s always a tiny possibility that two different data blocks might generate the same key, the blocks are only marked as identical after a bit by bit comparison of the data themselves. In the example six blocks are filtered out. On disk we just write a pointer to the real data. The new blocks are added. That way, a data block is only written once to disk. With this method, ProtecTIER targets a 25 to 1 ratio or storing an effective 1TB of data for 25TB of data that are written to tape.

One example : every day we take a full backup of 10TB. We have a daily change rate of about 15%. Starting the first day we actually have to write 10TB. Nothing’s filtered out and with a compression rate of 3:1 an actual 3.3TB is written to disk. The next day we take our full backup again. With a change rate of 15% we filter out 85% and we only have to write 15% or 1.5TB to disk. Again with a compression of 3:1, this means 0.5TB. After a week we have 70TB of uncompressed backup data. With ProtecTIER we write 6.3TB (3.3TB + 6x0.5TB) to disk. This is a ~11:1 ratio.

As you can see, this deduplication is always happening inline (at the moment of writing to disk) instead of some competitor’s postprocessing approach.

Connectivity to the mainframe

Click on image to see larger version in new window

In a mainframe environment the TS7680 ProtecTIER Gateway behaves as an Automated Tape Library (ATL) and is treated as such by the mainframe Oerating System. It emulates a maximum of 256 3592 Model J1A drives and you can write 1,000,000 tape images. Each virtual tape has a capacity of 100GB. The ‘library’ has standard DFSMS support. At the host side you don’t have to change applications, tape management systems and/or JCL to support the new ‘library’. De TS7680 requires at least z/OS 1.9 or z/VM 5.3.

You can see an illustration of the technical connectivity below.

Click on image to see larger version in new window

The ProtecTIER Gateway originates from the distributed environment and doesn’t know the FICON protocol. You might say we’ve seen the same before with the TS3500 tape library too. Therefore two control units are placed between the mainframe and the ProtecTIER Gateways. Each control unit has a maximum of four FICON connections. I would call them 3592-C06 controllers but they are nowhere indicated as such. As you can also see we have complete redundancy and failover capabilities for each component. The control units are connected with the ProtecTIER Gateways through Fiber Channel.
What stays the same as in the distributed environment is the choice of the disk system the TS7680 writes to. This can e.g. be a DS8000, but also a DS5000, an XIV or an SVC. The choice is up to you.

Documentation

• On February 9, 2010 there were two announcements, one for the hardware (ZG10-0075) and one for the software (ZP10-0064).
• The IBM TS7680 Protectier Deduplication Gateway for System z page.
• The TS7680 Data Sheet
• TechDocs presentation : ‘TS7680 Deduplication Gateway Host IOCP/IODF Definition’. It helps you define this Tape Library in HCD and IOCP.

IBM announcements - an overview

IBM made quite some interesting announcements this week. I'll just start by giving you a short overview, but I'm surely coming back to some of them in my next posts.

• DB2 10 goes beta as announced in 'IBM DB2 10 for z/OS launches beta program (ZP10-0015)'. As you can see the naming convention stays the same. The beta program starts on March 12, 2010. No idea when it will become generally available. If you want to know more about its functionalities, then you should take a look at Willie Favero's blog. He has a great post on DB2 10.
• It's also the time of year for the preview announcement of the next release of z/OS, so here we go : 'Preview: z/OS V1.12 - Heralding a new generation of smart operating systems (ZP10-0110)'. And apparently a new release of z/OS also means a new and enhanced release of z/OSMF : "z/OSMF V1.12 is planned to be expanded with the addition of z/OS Workload Manager Policy Editor functionality, enhancements to the already valuable Incident Log and Configuration Assistant for the z/OS Communications Server functions, and the ability to add non-z/OSMF application launch points and links".
  
• Here's one I like particulary because it's new for the System z community. IBM took over Diligent in 2008 because of Diligents de-duplication technology. Up to now the Protectier deduplication Gateway was only available for distributed systems. It's a virtual tape solution that emulates LTO tape drives and writes the data to an attached disk array. But, in the meantime it also de-duplicates the data which can lead up to a 'compression' factor of 25 times. Now this technology has also become available for System z. There are two announcements, one for the hardware and one for the software part. I'm definitely going to elaborate on these announcements in one of my future posts.
• A bit out of my league perhaps but we also had the announcement of the Power7 engine and some new models. The press release gives a good overview of this new announcement : 'IBM Unveils New POWER7 Systems To Manage Increasingly Data-Intensive Services'. I just have to mention this one as this will normally become the engine for a future generation DS8000.
• And before I forget it, we already had the announcement of GDPS V3.7 last week : 'IBM GDPS V3.7: Enterprise-wide infrastructure continuous availability and disaster recovery (ZS10-0013)'.
  

Major Storage Announcements

Today, IBM made some significant storage announcements in different fields. In this post I'll give you a first reference to some of the most important announcements and the major topics of these announcements.

XIV : Next generation open storage (ZG09-0529 - ZG09-0530)

• The IBM XIV Storage System Model A14
• Ranging from 72 to 180 1 TB SATA drives providing a usable capacity from 27 to 79 TB.
  
• Up to 24 ports of 4Gb Fibre Channel host connectivity
• Up to 6 ports of 1Gb iSCSI connectivity
• Advanced functions such as synchronous remote mirroring, thin provisioning, data migration, and writeable snapshot technology
• New flexible 3 year and 1 year hardware warranty options
• Statement of Direction : "By the end of 2009, IBM plans to deliver asynchronous mirroring capabilities on the IBM XIV Storage System".
• "XIV offers dual processors enabling up to 30% higher performance for some workloads".
• Planned availability : August 13, 2009
  

DS8000 R4.3 : Premier mainframe storage (ZG09-0497 - ZG09-0498)

• Thin Provisioning for Open Systems. "Thin Provisioning allows you to overcommit storage to specific devices and throughout the system in general (...) Thin provisioned devices offer performance that is comparable to standard, fully allocated, logical devices". As indicated : initially only for open systems. Thin provisioning requires an extra license which is announced separately (ZG09-0499 - ZG09-0500).
  
• Faster LUN initialization " improves initialization speeds up to 2.6 times over previous versions of the DS8000"
• Enhancement to High Performance FICON for System z enables higher throughput. zHPF Multitrack support means applications can read or write more than one track's worth of data in a single transfer, removing potential I/O bottlenecks.
• Planned availability for plant and field install : August 21, 2009
  

TS7650 ProtecTIER Gateway & Appliance Edition V2.3 : Data Deduplication enhanced with optional replication functionality (ZP09-0250 - ZP09-0258)

• Native IP-based Replication Capability : "ProtecTIER's IP replication function addresses two of the biggest requirements in a deduplication environment today : DR capabilities and offsite storage/archival. ProtecTIER IP replication provides a simple and affordable, over-the-WAN method to move data to a remote DR site, and supports tape archiving capabilities outside of the primary production environment".
• "Scalability options to address the storage needs of different sized customers"
• Inline deduplication delivers faster throughput, up to 1,000 MB/sec.
• Planned availability : September 4, 2009

You see, lots of announcements. I left out the 8Gb SAN switch announcements like e.g. the SAN384B. If you want to have a complete overview, you can also go to the storage page of IBM giving lots of information on the new announcements.


There is also one withdrawal that certainly draws our attention. It's the IBM System Storage DS8000 series Model 9B2 and selected features (ZG09-0521). Effective December 31, 2009, IBM will withdraw from marketing the following products:

• Model 9B2 on machine types 2421, 2422, 2423, and 2424
• Internal Management console
• Microcode Bundle Family - Release 4 Bundle Family
  
• All 2Gb FICON Adapters
  
• ESCON cables and ESCON adapters

All have replacements, but if I read this correctly ESCON is completely abandoned on the DS8000 as the only replacements indicated are FICON !