"Customers using the System z10 Business Class mainframe to power vital IT operations require a holistic yet simplified storage environment to meet critical data needs", stated Charlie Andrews, Director, System Storage Product Marketing. "The disk and tape enhancements announced today provide z10 Business Class customers with an optimal information infrastructure to complement the high-performance computing capabilities that the z10 system offers and further demonstrates the investment IBM is making in its information infrastructure portfolio of offerings."

IBM announced innovative new capabilities for the IBM System Storage DS8000 series, which includes a features designed to extend the performance and availability of IBM system z environments. The new DS8000 enhancements include:

• High Performance FICON for System z: Offers the ability to double the throughput of System z on-line transaction processing (OLTP) workloads by using standard fibre channel ports to transfer FICON commands and data. This new High Performance FICON capability is designed to not only help improve performance but also to help reduce overhead and improve end-to-end system reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS).
• z/OS Metro/Global Mirror Incremental Resync: Improves the business resiliency in a three-site Metro/Global Mirror implementation. When combined with System z’s Hyperswap feature, it can reduce resynchronization time needed after a Hyperswap from hours to minutes, thereby greatly increasing the availability of critical business applications. Not only can Incremental Resync greatly reduce the resynchronization time and bandwidth requirements after a Hyperswap, it can also lead to more effective data consistency between long distance sites very quickly to help reduce the risk, should another outage occur.

IBM also introduced new information availability, security and retention enhancements to the IBM Virtualization Engine TS7700 product series. To offer clients the ability to use the right technology to solve their back-up problem, the TS7700 family has been expanded to include a new model - the TS7720 Virtualization Engine. The TS7720 provides the benefits of the TS7700 Virtualization Engine with the additional flexabilbity of storing up to 70 Terabytes (TB) of data on a disk.

Among the highlights:

• The TS7720 has the same setup and configuration as the TS7740 and it is supported by the same System z operating system;
• The number of volumes supported depends on their size, up to a maximum of 1M just like the TS7740;
• The TS7720 can be stand alone or in a two or three site grid configuration;
• Both TS7700 models - the TS7720 and the TS7740 - will now support the TS1130 Enterprise Tape drive, including the 1TB tape cartridge, and the recently announced TS3500 High Density Library frame, providing customers up to 3X more capacity in the same footprint.