Virtual tape systems can provide significantly more functionality for tape data sets than physical tape systems. Virtual tape disk arrays provide levels of scalability, performance and flexibility for mainframe tape operations that are simply unavailable with physical tape. In many cases, a single virtual tape array can take the place of multiple tape subsystems to meet functionality requirements for batch processing, data protection, Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) migrations and archiving. In addition, they can extend Disaster Recovery (DR) capability to tape workloads with array-based replication…

The mainframe has long been a stable, reliable consistent platform for high-value, critical transactions such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), online order-taking and financial transaction processing. Mainframes today continue to touch most transactions worldwide. According to Independent Assessment, an industry authority on mainframe computing, 72 percent of the world’s financial transactions are processed on mainframes…

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a one-stop program or report you could use to completely solve any performance problem you’re troubleshooting? While, regrettably, that doesn’t exist, but you can use the FICON director activity report to drill down further into I/O performance problems. Only this report provides FICON frame pacing delay information, giving you a valuable way to narrow down the potential root cause(s) of a performance problem…

Today’s enterprise data centers typically span multiple locations and include a collection of storage products from various vendors. There’s likely a combination of storage types and storage media, including Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Network Attached Storage (NAS), each filled with an assortment of Solid State Disks (SSDs) and Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). Tape archive storage is probably also in the mix. IT managers face an ongoing challenge getting everything to play nicely together while still providing data protection and high-performance information access. To manage virtualized cloud environments within today’s IT budgets requires efficient, feature-rich, multi-platform storage management tools…

The most common physical tape operations are backup, Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) migration, data archiving, batch processing and work tapes that are used for temporary staging, Syncsort work files, transaction log files, and other tasks. Media management is one challenge of the tape environment; it requires planning, and tape management tasks consume IT staff time…

In banking, healthcare, aviation, communications and other industries around the globe, companies are focused on IT efficiency and reducing their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Confronted with budget constraints, pressure to increase service levels, compliance initiatives, concerns about energy consumption and costs, and the ever-present growth of data volumes, efficient operations are an ongoing challenge…

There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day and 80 percent of it is unstructured. Servers grew six times and storage 69 times from 2000 to 2010 according to IBM. Against this backdrop, IT budgets remain flat while user demands on the data center are accelerating. …

Best practices for transactional application systems aren’t always relevant to an enterprise data warehouse. There are structural differences, including database design and data access profiles. There are also different priorities. For example, data availability may be a higher priority than data recovery. Another significant difference is perceived performance. While an Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) system user might expect sub-second response, in the data warehouse, analytical queries may run for minutes or hours. Adding to this is the differing knowledge and expertise of the support staff, as well as a proliferation of departments managing various aspects of the data warehouse. What are the biggest differences? What are the biggest challenges for staff, Database Administrators (DBAs), and managers?…

The Myth of Big Data

White papers and blog entries about Big Data tout it as being of critical concern to data warehouse applications. But these two words oversimplify incredibly varied implementations. Let's consider the real-world meanings of this phrase:…

EMC, an industry leader in data storage, recently introduced technologies that give mainframe storage users much greater ability to actively manage the performance of stored data. As explained by EMC’s Flavio Fomin, the new technologies are Virtual Provisioning (VP) and Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) VP. In an interview with Enterprise Tech Journal, he explains what these technologies do, how they work, and what benefits they provide…