Gil Peleg wrote: >In my understanding all the products and offerings you >listed consider cloud storage as an additional tier on top of tape, while >Model9 is in a different segment of the storage market where cloud storage >is considered an alternative to tape and as a mean for enabling direct >access to mainframe data from cloud applications (and all cloud providers >support storing the data on tape when appropriate).
That's not my understanding. To my knowledge all of the products I listed are physical tape "agnostic." You can have physical tape drives/cartridges on premises or not, per whatever requirements you have. As for "enabling direct access to mainframe data from cloud applications," I don't think you're providing "direct" access to mainframe data. You're actually facilitating access to time lagged mainframe data (i.e. a replicated copy), with lots of considerations to take into account of course, including security considerations. "Cloud data replication" (and synchronization) is a competitive market segment and definitely not a new one. There are various fundamental, growing concerns and challenges with additional data copies. To get direct access to *live* mainframe data from cloud applications (which could be running on IBM Z machines too of course) the typical solution pattern involves data virtualization, and that's a competitive market segment, too. IBM Data Virtualization Manager for z/OS is an example of a product squarely in that category. Data virtualization and data replication are not mutually exclusive. By the way, I should have included z/VSE's VTAPE in my previous list of examples. IBM introduced VTAPE in VSE/ESA 2.6 (generally available on December 14, 2001) and has considerably enhanced it subsequently. It might have even been backported to earlier VSE/ESA releases. VTAPE is available at no additional charge to VSE/ESA and z/VSE licensees. See the relevant links on this page for details: https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/zvse-downloads There are some z/VSE VTAPE compatible utilities available for z/OS here: http://www.cbttape.org/awstape.htm z/VSE VTAPE is interoperable with Encryption Facility for z/VSE and with IBM Spectrum Protect (and its predecessor Tivoli Storage Manager). - - - - - - - - - - Timothy Sipples I.T. Architect Executive Digital Asset & Other Industry Solutions IBM Z & LinuxONE - - - - - - - - - - E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
