FICON Tape Acceleration

The sequential nature of tape devices causes each I/O operation to the tape device over an FCIP link to incur the latency of the FCIP link. Throughput drastically decreases as the round-trip time through the FCIP link increases, leading to longer backup windows. Also, after each I/O operation, the tape device is idle until the next I/O arrives. Starting and stopping of the tape head reduces the lifespan of the tape, except when I/O operations are directed to a virtual tape.

Cisco MDS NX-OS software provides acceleration for the following FICON tape write operations:

• The link between mainframe and native tape drives (both IBM and Sun/STK)
• The back-end link between the VSM (Virtual Storage Management) and tape drive (Sun/STK)

FICON tape acceleration over FCIP provides the following advantages:

• Efficiently utilizes the tape device by decreasing idle time
• More sustained throughput as latency increases
• Similar to FCP tape acceleration, and does not conflict with it

Note     FICON tape read acceleration over FCIP is supported from Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 5.0(1). For more information refer to the "Configuring FICON Tape Read Acceleration" topic.

Note     For information about FCIP tape acceleration, refer to the Cisco MDS 9000 Family NX-OS IP Services Configuration Guide.

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