Your network infrastructure should reflect strength and perseverance, just like your business model itself. Just as there are peaks and valleys in our daily lives, business is subject to experience the same manner of cycles in both financial growth and productivity. Implementing a solid disaster recovery plan is critical to minimize down time in the event of a catastrophe. A myriad of disaster recovery tactics are available in today’s market but not all are created equal. IBM offers a solution to meet these needs in their TS7700 class of virtualization engines.

The IBM TS7700 Virtualization Engine works by harmonizing a select few pertinent technologies in a single unit. The IBM TS7700 utilizes both traditional hard disks as well as tape storage to maximize the efficiency of a backup or restore process. Tape storage, though considered obsolete by some, is still a viable way to store information. On its own, it falls short when compared to the speed and accessibility of a modern hard drive but has advantages in durability. Tape uses a mostly linear sequential method to store data so it’s slower at accessing data. The advantages of tape lie in the fact that it is inexpensive and should a head on a drive fail, the media is not a total loss. The IBM TS7700 family uses a hierarchical system of storage that emphasizes the strengths of both devices as it reads and writes data. The unit comes preinstalled with two TB disks configured in a RAID 6 array. By using these two storage mechanisms in tandem, the tapes are able to function at speeds relative to the hard drive, reducing the bottleneck problems that plagued tape devices in the past.

The IBM TS7700 is part of the class of systems that use the IBM z/Architecture. This type of architecture allows systems to have multiple 2 GB spaces in memory allocated, so memory burdening tasks are not limited by the restraints of a typical 64 bit system so several large operations may be carried out in parallel. The strength of this system is supplemented by utilizing IBM’s fiber optic technology FICON. This type of channel-to-control architecture allows for data transfer speeds of up 4 GB per second. Such technology allows these speeds to maintain up to 100 km away. If a proper DWDM connection is established, these transfer speeds can actually be observed at distances of up to 250 km.

Scalability is a crucial feature to the design of the IBM TS7700 family. The units may be implemented as a grid system and supports cluster sizes of up to 6. A single node can support up 256 virtual drives – a grid of 6 can have as many as 1536. The tape drives of a single node can range from 4 to 16. Utilizing an IBM System Storage TS1140 tape, for instance, you have the ability to store up to 12 Tb if using a 3 to 1 compression ratio. The tape storage system is quite secure as it utilizes the IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manage or TKLM. This encrypts data across the entire domain so should a tape turn up missing or a hacker peek into your network, your data will not be compromised.

Author Bio :-

Nordisk systems specialized in Tivoli storage manager provides solutions that authorizes and authenticates user access to Web applications. Protect your valuable data from power failures, natural disasters by using our Disaster Recovery solutions.