IBM Updates Virtual Tape Engine

July 11, 2007: IBM has announced its next generation of virtual tape solutions for its mainframe customers, promising significant enhancements to its IBMR Virtualisation Engine TS7740.

The company says this latest mainframe virtual-tape offering is designed to support business continuity, improved tape processing and energy efficiency through grid computing connectivity and automated replication.

Because of these improvements in energy consumption, the company is touting the new kit as a “green” storage solution, but aside from this it also offers automatic duplication of tape data across three data centres via its Three Site GRID Configuration.

IBM claims this helps it maintain availability in the event of a disaster, and enables a Virtual Tape Grid computing environment to be created with “global awareness functionality” that allows data to reside at three different sites while being easily tracked and accessed when needed.

“IBM introduced the first ever tape storage virtualisation product a decade ago,” said Cindy Grossman, vice president, IBM tape storage systems. “Building on this legacy, IBM today expands its leadership in energy efficient forms of data storage, including tape storage and virtualization solutions, both of which are highlighted in today's announcement.”

The company expects the new TS7740 solution to be available on August 31 this year.

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