The IBM(R) TS7700 is a highly customizable, scalable tape virtualization solution that provides data protection and business continuance for System z data. Through the use of virtualization and disk cache, the TS7700 family operates at disk speeds while maintaining compatibility with existing tape operations.
In this eLearning module, you will learn about the concepts of storage virtualization, the components of the TS7700, the configurations available, and the value the TS7700 can provide for your business.
A virtual storage environment includes virtual tape drives and virtual volumes. Data is written to or retrieved from the tape volume cache rather than physical tape cartridges.
This provides tape read and write access at disk speeds.
Hosts attached to a TS7700 are presented with an image of up to 256 virtual tape drives, which emulate the operation of physical tape drives. These virtual tape drives read data from, and write data to, virtual volumes within a tape volume cache. These virtual volumes function as physical volumes, or tape cartridges.
The modular structure of the TS7700 makes it both scalable and customizable to fit your storage requirements. There are three major hardware components in the TS7700, which are all mounted in the tape frame. These are:
The TS7700 has three possible system configurations:
The TS7720 is a disk-only system that does not connect to a physical library. The cache can contain up to 240TB of raw disk cache. You can expand the cache to 624TB of raw capacity by attaching the TS7720 Storage Expansion Frame.
While the TS7740 has less cache storage, a maximum of 28.8 TB, it connects to a physical tape library to provide a flexible, policy-managed configuration that offers the benefits of both tape and disk storage. It offers high-performance delivery for active data and low-cost storage for inactive and archive data.
The new TS7720 tape attach combines the large internal storage capacity of the TS7720 with the ability to connect to a physical tape library similar to the TS7740.
A TS7700 grid is two or more separate TS7700 clusters connected by means of a TCP/IP network to one another to form a high availability or disaster recovery solution. A grid can consist of TS7720 clusters, TS7740 clusters, TS7720 with tape attach clusters, or a combination of these. A grid can include a minimum of two clusters and a maximum of six clusters. A hybrid TS7700 grid consists of at least one cluster that is attached to a physical tape library and one cluster that is not.
In a grid, virtual volume attributes are synchronized across all clusters allowing the emulated virtual devices for each cluster to have access to all the volumes. During outages, through virtual volume replication, redundant copies are transparently made available through any other cluster. Even when a specific cluster does not contain a virtual volume copy, it can still access redundant copies contained within peer clusters using the TCP/IP infrastructure as a channel extender.
The TS7700 can help you to run multiple jobs simultaneously, because the number of tape drives is no longer a limiting factor. You will experience increase backup performance, because all jobs are written to disk cache. When configured properly, this allows for fully utilized underlying physical tape storage capacity. The result is reduced primary data workload and staging times, reduced backup and recovery times, and a lower overall total cost of ownership.
Today you learned the basics of how the TS7700 works. For additional information, see IBM Knowledge Center and other eLearning modules to learn more.