Fortifying Protection of the World’s Most Critical Data with New EMC DLm Enhancements

As more mainframe data travels on mobile and cloud platforms and back to the datacenter, mainframe data protection and recoverability are more critical than ever.  The traditional protection afforded by physical tape is no longer practical. EMC Disk Library for mainframe (DLm) revolutionized traditional tape data protection for the mainframe, and today we’re extending its value proposition even further with DLm release 4.1.

With the release of DLm 4.1, DLm 8100 and DLm 2100 users benefit from:

  • Simplification of D/R testing for EMC VNX based DLms
  • Single drive performance improvements
  • Deeper operational insights
  • IPv6 Compliance

Mainframe data protection is a critical part of the “data protection continuum,” which is the full range of data protection requirements that must be met.   Mainframe data exists at the core of almost every critical financial transaction in the world. As SHARE.org chronicled,  “96 of the world’s top 100 banks, 23 of the 25 top US retailers, and 9 out of 10 of the world’s largest insurance companies run System z Mainframes, processing roughly 30 billion business transactions per day, including most major credit card transactions and stock trades, money transfers…”

Effective mainframe data protection must be optimized around four use cases for best-in-class ROI:  1) Backup / Restore 2) Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) 3) Long Term Data Retention and 4) “General Work Tapes.” DLm was specifically designed for these cases.

Resolving Key Disaster Recovery Testing, Usability and Performance Issues

Storage administrators have to perform Disaster Recovery (D/R) tests under tight time constraints. With Release 4.1, EMC has uniquely automated what can be rather complex D/R test configurations for our popular VNX storage within DLm, simplifying D/R set-up with menus executed on the mainframe.

Administrators are constantly optimizing their tape storage, so this release gives storage personnel more operational insight with new GUI options to view storage usage, performance and system health.

As customers continue to migrate off physical tape, they asked EMC for performance enhancements to match that of streaming tape.  Some datacenters run thousands of jobs, sequentially to a few or even one tape drive.  Ironically, this can be a daunting task even for a high performance virtual tape system like DLm. With this update, DLm can achieve up to 80% performance improvement for such environments.

DLm Pulse slide

Release 4.1 is a significant step forward in the committed evolution of DLm for protecting critical mainframe data, delivering with what really matters: performance, ease of use, storage choice and compliance.

Want to hear more?

Join us at EMC World where, once again, EMC is sponsoring a dedicated track of mainframe sessions detailing all of our latest innovations.  Join us in Las Vegas May 5th – 8th.  To register, click here.

About the Author: Paul O'Connor