Folks, IBM is shipping and continues to ship lots of physical tape
libraries and tape drives for z/OS (and z/VM, z/TPF, and z/VSE), and it's a
big IBM investment area to keep pushing forward on densities, performance,
and reliability. There is absolutely no limitation on continuing to use
physical tape media for your organization's data storage needs. Those needs
keep growing as data volumes keep exploding, so we (all of us) need big
data storage more than ever. Please keep on trucking!
Radoslaw Skorupka wrote:
>...can I insert physical cart into TS7700?
No, you cannot. Or at least nothing would happen if you tried except you
might damage your TS7700 and/or the cartridge. :-)
But you know what else you've never been able to do? You've never been able
to insert a tape cartridge into an IBM 3592 tape controller, that ("dumb")
box that sits/sat between your mainframe and your tape libraries/drives.
The 3592 controller attached to your mainframe via FICON (maximum 4 Gb/s in
the 3592-C07 and -C06, which is the best it ever got; slower FICON, ESCON,
and Bus/Tag in earlier 359x and prior controller iterations), and the
controller connected to your tape libraries/drives however they required,
which varied. (It was even more complicated than that with library manager
boxes, but all that's been simplified, thank goodness.)
You insert tape cartridges into tape drives, of course. You still do. Well,
nowadays you hand the tape cartridge to a tape library robot that does that
carefully, precisely, and quickly. In today's product line that's an IBM
TS4500 automated tape library with IBM TS1150 (or TS1140) tape drives, and
that's attached to an IBM TS7700 (now TS7760) smart tape controller
equipped with staging/cache, otherwise known as a Virtual Tape Library
(VTL) or VTS. The TS7760 is mainframe-attached.
See how that works? Here's the before:
Mainframe <-> IBM 3592-C0x <-> Older Library/Drives (plus some library
manager boxes)
And here's the now:
Mainframe <-> IBM TS7760 <-> Library/Drives
That middle part is now a heck of a lot smarter, and those libraries and
drives are better than ever (faster, higher density, encryption capable --
please use that!). Smarter also means most of the sysprog-related chores
(agonies?) for each and every tape media technology transition are history,
and thank goodness for that, too.
....As an aside, if I were to go dig through the IBM-MAIN archives in the
era when disk storage made the analogous transition from "purely" physical
(IBM 3390 Model 9 as the final example) to virtualized-physical, would I
have seen similar angst and confusion about this technology progression --
something we now, roughly a quarter century later, mostly and increasingly
take for granted? I appreciate nostalgia and all, but we've seen this movie
before, haven't we? Physical tape continues, and it's better and smarter
than ever.
You CAN use the IBM TS7700 products without physical tape libraries and
tape drives. That mode of operations is POSSIBLE, a "new" trick. (Well,
"new" here means since sometime in the 1990s probably.) However, it's
certainly not mandatory to use your smart controller on its own. Please go
right ahead and get physical tape libraries and tape drives to accompany
all your IBM TS7700s, and configure your TS7700s to be only minimally smart
if you wish. Your friendly IBM sales representative is happy to help.
For that matter, you CAN operate an IBM Z machine with only disk and/or
flash storage, and without IBM TS7700 equipment. That's also POSSIBLE. And
isn't it wonderful you've got all these options? You do need a tape
controller for physical tape. That's always been true, and it continues to
be true. The tape controller just happens to be smart, and you can exploit
its smartness to its minimum extent, its maximum extent, or anywhere in
between, as you prefer.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Timothy Sipples
IT Architect Executive, Industry Solutions, IBM Z & LinuxONE,
Multi-Geography
E-Mail: [email protected]
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