Tapes Are Still Hot, and That’s Cool
By Stefan Kochishan, Director, Product Marketing

The supposed demise of mainframe tapes has been erroneously predicted and discussed for a long time, often in the same sentence announcing the “death” of the mainframe. Are tapes really on the way out? Hardly.

Now more than ever, mainframe tape technology is alive and thriving in the datacenter. Strong consumer demand continues for functionality beyond “basic” z/OS mainframe Tape Management Systems (TMS) — CA 1® Tape Management, CA TLMS® Tape Management, IBM DFDSSrmm, BMC Control/T, ASG Zara, for example — as users seek to unify major tape operations by automating critical monitoring and analysis of their TMS, robotics and virtual tape systems, tape encryption and key management, and of course, the tape media itself.

Ultimately, efficient tape management delivers peace of mind through improvements in business objectives focused on data protection, risk elimination, managing total costs of ownership (TCO), increased performance, compliance security and energy (“green” initiatives).

Technology Challenges are Business Challenges
z/OS tape technologists face a significant business challenge — to reduce tape storage costs. Expensive media and management coupled with inefficiently used tapes compound the problem. Additionally, inefficiency is aggravated by tape capacities increasing more than 20 fold over the past few years, further lowering occupancy percentages and pushing up cost.

Industry figures have shown corporate data growing at an astounding rate, often doubling annually. This data must be protected and backed up while service levels for application availability are met. As storage requirements have increased, so have the needs for additional tape and robotic hardware. The life span of physical tape drives has historically been short, with tape capacity continuously expanding and physical tape drive mechanics improving. As newer generations are introduced, hardware vendors increase the maintenance on older technology, driving up costs. To help control these costs, customers are forced to upgrade to newer models.

• Tape remains the de facto technology to protect and archive data. Tape backup is a key part of the data life cycle, protecting data on disk and later archived/stored for disaster recovery and record-keeping policies. However, while the data is backed up, the media used could be underutilized and actually drive the cost of ownership higher.
• IT departments continue purchasing (or planning to purchase) virtual tape systems to decrease physical tape handling and improve throughput and performance. However businesses could be affected by proprietary hardware solutions that are expensive to replicate at remote or disaster recovery locations and do not work with other systems.
• To reduce the risk of unauthorized access to confidential information and fulfill escalating security breach of information compliance requirements, companies are selecting encryption for tapes. However, encryption alone is not sufficient and companies could actually lose data with ineffective key management.
• The ability to visualize and have knowledge across the entire tape infrastructure that may span several sites and CPUs. However, tape managers must become “product experts,” learning how to manage several niche solutions, impeding their efficiency and effectiveness.

It should not surprise you to learn that as the leading independent software vendor (ISV) of vendor- and media-neutral tape management solutions for over thirty years, CA understands the complexities involved with tape operation unification, simplification and business optimization. Our tape solutions help companies achieve technology and business objectives through automated management and optimization of all major virtual tape systems, major third-party tape management systems, automated tape libraries, physical media and tape drives.

Challenges + Technology Best Practices = Real Business Value

• Best Practice: Tape storage asset optimization yields significant cost savings. Automation speeds operational effectiveness to save time and resources and reduce overall tape TCO. Stacking virtual volumes eliminates physical tape media requirements, and the amount of data stored on a physical tape improves to near 100 percent.
• Value: Fewer physical tapes mean less floor space requirements, less manual tape handling and increased utilization of expensive hardware. Automation also ensures accuracy, saves time and improves productivity and effectiveness.

• Best Practice: Increasing effective storage utilization rates maximizes the use and life of tape media investments and can yield significant media cost savings.
• Value: Eliminates and defrays hardware purchases while reducing the floor space needed for hardware. Less hardware means less environmental costs (HVAC, electrical, etc.).

• Best Practice: Global management and protection of critical tape data is paramount for safeguarding personal and business-critical information from unauthorized access.
• Value: Data breach protection (no fines, negative publicity, remediation costs or lost customers).

• Best Practice: A media-neutral and vendor-neutral approach will yield reduced complexity and speed time to market by optimizing heterogeneous tape storage infrastructures without requiring extensive training or knowledge.
• Value: Helps avoid being locked into a specific vendor’s proprietary hardware system.

• Best Practice: Consider exploiting new technology, such IBM's System z9 Integrated Information Specialty Processor (zIIP) to offload virtualization and compression and encryption processing from the mainframe’s general-purpose processor.
• Value: Enables businesses to fully protect growing volumes of business-critical data by unifying on the zIIP processor to reduce MSU requirements and tape storage management costs.

CA’s Tape Innovations
CA’s world-class tape technology secures information with tape encryption and key management, improves utilization using software virtual tape technology, and lets you manage your enterprise tape infrastructure across CPUs. It eliminates multiple, expensive niche products, leading to greater profitability. And, it gives you the flexibility to select the “best” tape storage technology for your environment without restrictions or vendor lock-in.

For mainframe businesses that depend on flawless z/OS tape operations, CA offers great tape technologies in complementary promotional packages designed to address technology and business demands.

Learn More
Both “Tape Utilization and Compliance” and “Automated Storage Optimization” are components of CA Mainframe Suites, which exploit the value of the mainframe balanced with business and regulatory requirements to maximize your mainframe investments. Designed to enhance base product functionality, the Suites offer you the ability to optimize system assets, standardize processes, leverage existing mainframe investments, improve utilization, improve service levels and contain costs. Our Suites are designed to meet your enterprise's needs, today and tomorrow.

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