Thriving in the Mainframe World: 4th Gen EMC Disk Library for Mainframe Sets a New Standard

Even with significant growth in mainframe market share in 2012, Darwinian evolution never takes a break at EMC.

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But don’t just take our word for it – watch the video above to see how Credit Suisse revamped their tape processing, avoided a costly tape migration, eliminated 100,000 tape cartridges, and saved $8 million!

Today, EMC announced the next generation of Disk Library for Mainframe (DLm) systems; the DLm 8100 and DLm 2100.  Enabled by an enhanced virtual tape engine and new 8 Gb/s FICON adapters, the new products deliver 2x the scalability of the previous generation, with support for up to 11.4 PB of logical capacity and up to 80% faster performance, making the new systems more than 4x faster than the nearest competitor.

The new DLm product line consists of the DLm8100, ideal for large enterprises, and the DLm2100 for small-to-medium sized environments. The DLm8100 offers up to 16 FICON connections and support for VMAX, VNX, or Data Domain storage platforms. The DLm2100 offers from one to four FICON connections and support for VNX or Data Domain storage – and when configured with Data Domain protection storage, can be shared between mainframes and open system servers.

Survival of the Fittest

The new generation products continue our tradition of innovation and market-leading performance and scalability in mainframe data protection:

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But most importantly, unlike competitive offerings that require different solutions for different workloads, the enhanced performance and scalability of the new DLm products further extend EMC’s unique ability to support all mainframe workloads with a single platform.

In mainframe environments, it’s not just about backup and restore.  There are four key ways in which data is managed: 1) Backup and Restore 2) Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) 3) Archiving, and 4) “General Work Tapes.” The DLm’s architecture is well suited to manage all of these environments – efficiently and effectively.

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Darwinism Never Takes a Break

From the beginning, the DLm product line has revolutionized the way traditional tape-based information is accessed and used in modern mainframe data centers. Today’s announcement further enables customers to:

  • Simplify their tape environment and processing
  • Enjoy sub-second access to petabytes of archive data
  • Dramatically reduce backup and failover times
  • Reduce recall times from minutes to less than a second
  • Never again do a costly tape migration
  • Optimize storage performance and cost by leveraging primary and deduplication storage
  • Reduce cost and complexity leveraging the DLm’s capability to support all tape use cases in a single manageable platform

The new DLm products are a significant step forward in EMC’s industry-leading technology for solving critical and complex mainframe customer problems. This next generation propels our customers ahead in the evolution of mainframe storage efficiency with what really matters: scalability, performance, storage choice and cost-saving deduplication when customers, large or small, need it.

About the Author: Peter Smails