Another zIIP post : VTFM

This skipped my attention too, but apparantly VTFM (Virtual Tape Facility for Mainframe Systems) is now also supporting zIIP "for most of its workload". I won't blame you if you don't know the product. Actually, I wrote about it once before at the end of 2008. It came into the hands of IBM when IBM took over Dilligent. The de-duplication technology has gotten al lot of attention since, but VTFM stayed in the catalogue as well. You can best compare it with CA-VTape. Both are softwares running on z/OS acting as a virtual tape library.

CA-VTape was one of the first ISV softwares to offer zIIP support and the customers I know using it are quite satisfied with the offload it realizes to zIIP. So let's hope that the promise of VTFM to also offload "most of its workload" to zIIP proves to be true.

You can find all necessery information to implement the zIIP support via this APAR PM06523.