Dell Technologies announces Dell EMC DLm 5.3

Today, Dell Technologies is announcing Dell EMC Disk Library for mainframe (DLm) virtual tape release 5.3. New DLm enhancements deliver cloud connectivity and simplify operations, including Amazon S3 cloud support, supporting IBM-compatible Transparent Cloud Tiering, 3-site automated tape failover, and a new graphical user interface for the DLm8500. These features are coming out together with the new DLm 2500, purposed for feature-rich, yet cost-effective mainframe storage.

Today, Dell Technologies is announcing Dell EMC Disk Library for mainframe (DLm) virtual tape release 5.3. New DLm enhancements deliver cloud connectivity and simplify operations, including Amazon S3 cloud support, supporting IBM-compatible Transparent Cloud Tiering, 3-site automated tape failover, and a new graphical user interface for the DLm8500. These features are coming out together with the new DLm 2500, purposed for feature-rich, yet cost-effective mainframe storage.

Dell Technologies’ DLm is company’s mainframe tape replacement solution in scalability and performance. The Dell EMC DLm8500 offers IBM z Systems and Unisys Dorado / Clearpath mainframe users to replace their physical tape and virtual tape servers with an integrated virtual tape solution to improve storage utilization and processing performance. This solution includes traditional virtual tape servers such as the IBM TS7700 family and Oracle/STK VSM, with a dynamic virtual tape solution, eliminating the challenges tied to standard tape-based processing.

In supporting IBM-compatible Transparent Cloud Tiering, Dell Technologies is leveraging its award-winning all-flash PowerMax 8000 and PowerProtect DD series of deduplication storage and, optionally, object storage using Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS). All of these products combine to ensure that physical (or virtual) tape requirements for mainframe data protection are met.

DLm 5.3 brings four key enhancements:

DLm Virtual Tape enables Amazon AWS and Amazon GovCloud via S3.

Dell Technologies recognizes that mainframe’s storage strategy must increasingly leverage its expanding cloud infrastructure to reduce costs. In recent years, Amazon has expanded its cloud offering, tailoring AWS to include US government users with an offering known as “Amazon GovCloud.” In this DLm release, this offering is now supported, making it easier for US federal agencies with mainframes and an AWS account, to store their data.

PowerMax 8000 with DLm Virtual Tape and Dell EMC ECS helps eliminate costly mainframe CPU usage. 

Dell EMC PowerMax 8000 and DLm users can make use of Transparent Cloud Tiering, fully compatible in operation with IBM’s implementation. With Dell EMC IBM-Compatible Transparent Cloud Tiering, a Dell EMC Rest API Proxy running on the mainframe communicates with HSM and directs data on PowerMax storage to and from the DLm, and ultimately onto Dell EMC ECS cloud object storage. At the same time, associated metadata is updated in the cloud.

This implementation of PowerMax and DLm results in the elimination of mainframe CPU cycles (MIPS) to move the data from the storage tier to the tape tier and finally to the cloud tier. It also leverages a fast FICON tape interface while giving users an on-prem vs. cloud option for data.

DLm automated failover is also enhanced with additional multitenancy and 3-site capability.

DLm continues to evolve its support in a multiplicity of environments, leveraging investments to be more than just “tape replacement.” DLm’s “multi-tenancy” and “shared storage” capability enable organizations to use virtual tape to satisfy the simultaneous needs of multiple departments’ demand for their own “unique” tape, with their own set of specifications like RPO / RTO or tape addressing.

Now, DLm 8500 and Dell EMC GDDR automated failover version 5.3 expand on the ability to automate the failover of DLms to a 3rd asynchronous site, which is a standard configuration for DR.

Simplifying mainframe virtual tape operations and sharing storage in tough economic times

Also being introduced in this release, DLm8500’s simple, intuitive graphical interface. It is an ideal operational interface for companies that may need to stretch their existing storage administration staff to cover more systems or re-assign non-mainframe staff to manage mainframe tape operations. From the new “dashboard” to a consolidated view of tape volumes and tape libraries, the DLm8500’s GUI aims to make tape operations a simple matter of “point and click.”

Dell Technologies

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