Storagetek Virtual Storage Manager System Version 6 And

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StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System Version 6 and Brocade Extension Solutions ORACLE WHITE PAPER | MARCH 2015 Table of Contents Introduction 2 Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Define Higher Levels of Protection and Availability 2 Current Problems Related to Data Protection Are Cited 3 Implementing a Modern Data Protection Strategy 3 The Advantages of Virtual Tape in Achieving High Availability 4 Modernizing Virtual Tape 4 StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System and Brocade Extension Technology 4 Brocade Extension Technology 5 The Brocade 7800 and FX8-24 5 Brocade Emulation Processes for FICON Access to Tapes 5 Brocade ICX 6430 6 Brocade Extension Management 7 Summary 7 1 | STORAGETEK VIRTUAL STORAGE MANAGER SYSTEM VERSION 6 AND BROCADE EXTENSION SOLUTIONS Introduction There is growing complexity and challenge for enterprise data centers trying to meet business continuity, disaster recovery (DR), batch, primary data, and archival storage requirements. Without careful planning, each of these could entail using its own unique storage solution and thereby create more complexity. As a result, versatility is quickly becoming the new mandate for meeting many enterprise-class (mainframe) data center storage requirements. A combination of storage virtualization, disk, tape, robotic libraries, and channel extension within the network is integrated into easy-to-use, cost-effective solutions. This paper discusses the advantages of using Oracle’s StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System 6 system along with Brocade extension solutions. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Define Higher Levels of Protection and Availability Business continuity and disaster recovery are two of IT's most pressing issues. Fail-proof data backup and recovery is more critical to an organization’s survival than ever before as few businesses can survive for any period of time without their IT function. With increasing reliance on what is in most cases a company’s most valuable asset ― digital data ― an organization can quickly lose millions of dollars associated with lost access to data along with much of its competitive advantage and credibility, as has been the case in many highly visible security breaches. A primary focus on backup architectures and protecting data. It’s important to understand the various roles of backup, which is a data protection process for executing two primary data center functions: » Business continuity (BC) ― provides a local copy of data to be used should an application or infrastructure component fail or data become corrupted. For business continuity, fast initial access time is critical. Therefore, disk is the preferred choice. Customers need to consider how they handle disk hardware failures, application failures, and/or network failures. Tape could be used as well, in conjunction with disk, in order to continue and assure BC and disaster recovery (DR), enabling fast backup and restore of small chunks of data such as system and user files, emails, and incremental backups. » Disaster recovery ― provides a copy of data that can be maintained offsite and that can be restored from another location, should the primary data center facility no longer be available. For DR, fast data transfer time and high availability are critical. Therefore, tape is the optimal DR choice, enabling fast backup and restore of large amounts of data (large databases, servers, or even entire data centers). It’s important to distinguish between a business continuity event and a disaster recovery event. Business continuity is the activity performed by an organization to ensure that critical business functions are available to customers, suppliers, regulators, and other entities that must have access to those functions. These activities can include file and database backups, project management, change control, or help desk services. Business continuity is not something implemented at the time of a disaster; rather, business continuity refers to the activities performed daily to maintain quality of service, consistency, and recoverability. DR consists of the process, policies, and procedures that are related to preparing for a recovery after the occurrence of a natural or human-induced disaster that may impact the entire data center functionality rather than specific files. While business continuity involves planning for keeping all aspects of a business functioning in the midst of disruptive events, disaster recovery focuses on the availability of the IT infrastructure systems that support critical business functions. Many mainframe enterprises adopt a three-site strategy and choose to configure their DR strategies this way: Forty percent of enterprises locate two of their three data centers in the same metropolitan region but in two separate data centers within a 40 km radius of each other; sixty percent usually have two discrete data centers within the same 2 | STORAGETEK VIRTUAL STORAGE MANAGER SYSTEM VERSION 6 AND BROCADE EXTENSION SOLUTIONS building but on different floors or on the same floor with firewall separating the data centers. [Source: Enterprise Tech Journal March April 2013, pp 18-19]. Current Problems Related to Data Protection Are Cited An independent survey of 500 CIOs conducted in November 2012 across the US and Europe found that enterprises (large-scale IT organizations with more than 1,000 employees) still are not experiencing the full benefits of storage virtualization or the advantages of modern data protection tools and architectures. Key findings from the study show that capability, complexity, and cost issues are hampering IT departments: » 68 percent of CIOs feel that their backup and recovery tools will become less effective as the amount of data and servers in their organization steadily grows. » 88 percent of CIOs experience capability-related challenges with backup and recovery, 87 percent with cost, and 84 percent with complexity, showing that data protection is still not a simple task. » 58 percent of CIOs are planning to change their backup tool for virtual environments by 2014. » Financially, CIO respondents stated the cost per hour of downtime ― for their business-critical servers that are not being protected by replication ― as $324, 793.00. Coupled with a recovery time of five hours or more, this means that, on average, each outage is costing organizations at least $1.6 million. Unless data protection evolves, these costs will continue to increase. This is even more significant in mainframe environments where many of the world’s most mission-critical applications are hosted. [Survey Source: The third edition of Veeam Annual Virtualization Data Protection Report 2013]. Implementing a Modern Data Protection Strategy What are the best data protection options available? In its most basic form, backup is simply a tool or method for executing business continuity processes (with disk) or disaster recovery processes (with tape). The challenges of effective backup are numerous given the range of application availability requirements, but so are the options. Effective data protection plans address both business continuity and disaster recovery by defining operational procedures, implementing hardware redundancy, and practicing/testing the recovery processes. Under mounting pressure to reduce the amount of time required and the amount of storage consumed by backup/recovery methods, organizations can explore many new solutions that offer a variety of choices depending on what operating system, storage technologies, and network connectivity are in use. Other factors include when and how the data is protected; if compression, encryption, or write-once, read-many (WORM) are used; and if any additional geographic locations are involved for data redundancy. Backing up and later restoring potentially huge amounts of data in the least disruptive manner is becoming increasingly difficult given the tremendous and steady amount of digital data growth. Disk is the preferred business continuity backup target for smaller data files demanding the fastest recovery time objective (RTO), while tape is the optimal backup choice for large files and disaster recovery processes. An all-disk data protection and archiving solution is an increasingly expensive option. Recently published studies indicate that the five-year total cost of ownership (TCO) for disk ranges up to 15X higher than if tape storage is incorporated as a storage tier. The Clipper Group Calculator dated May 13, 2013 shows that the cost of disk is 26X greater than tape for backup and archiving. The initial acquisition cost or purchase price per GB is also much lower for tape. Data that is not being used should not consume energy. The best TCO is achieved when deploying a tiered storage approach integrating both disk and tape. A good “rule of thumb” for a compote data protection solution is the “3-2-1 rule.” This utilizes three copies of the data in two different technologies (disk and tape), and one copy offsite and offline. 3 | STORAGETEK VIRTUAL STORAGE MANAGER SYSTEM VERSION 6 AND BROCADE EXTENSION SOLUTIONS The Advantages of Virtual Tape in Achieving High Availability The virtual tape library (VTL) concept first appeared in the late 1990s for mainframes, and it became a successful storage virtualization technology used primarily for backup and recovery purposes. A VTL presents a storage component (using hard disk arrays) as tape libraries or tape drives for easy use with existing backup software. A VTL enables the storage hardware to be switched from tapes to disks while continuing to use the existing tape backup software and processes. The benefits of virtualization includes storage consolidation, faster data restore times, and better RTOs. For large data sets and DR operations requiring large amounts of data to be moved, the streaming data transfer speed of tape is faster than disk. Modernizing Virtual Tape Oracle's StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System 6 is the latest generation of its mainframe virtual tape system. StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System 6 is the first and only mainframe virtual tape storage system to provide a single point of management for the entire system, and it leverages the highest existing levels of security provided by System z environments. It provides a unique multitiered storage system that can include both physical disk and tape storage for business continuity, disaster recovery, long-term archival, and big data requirements for z/OS applications. Each StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System 6 moves data to and from disk storage and backend tape transports attached to automated tape libraries. As data on StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System disk ages, it can be migrated from disk to physical tape libraries such as Oracle's StorageTek SL8500 and StorageTek SL3000 modular library systems. These systems can be attached to StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System to provide nearly unlimited capacity (more than an exabyte) to meet long-term data retention, archive, and compliance needs. Protecting data throughout its lifecycle is a reality with a single architecture. StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System and Brocade Extension Technology StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System 6 and Brocade Extension technology offers the flexibility to address multiple enterprise configuration requirements including high-performance disk only or massively scalable disk and physical tape, as well as single or multisite support for disaster recovery. In addition, physical tape channel extension can be used to extend the StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System 6 storage to span onsite and offsite repositories that are geographically dispersed. StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System 6 offers a number of compelling replication solutions to provide the highest levels of protection and availability. For business resumption and disaster recovery purposes, the versatility of StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System 6 provides the capability to make additional backup copies of primary data, keep data in multiple sites in sync, and copy data offsite to multiple geographic locations. Synchronous or asynchronous node clustering across FICON or Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), cross tapeplex replication (CTR), and real tape drive channel extension for remote site physical tape support all provide exceptional levels of enterprise data availability and redundancy. Utilizing Brocade Extension technology enables these capabilities. The optimum solution for the future addresses the needs for business continuity, disaster recovery, and archive by taking advantage of both disk and tape technology. Versatility in a storage solution now becomes the key ingredient for attaining the highest availability levels possible for meeting looming storage requirements. Tape and disk historically have been used to meet most of the archive demand, and today they are optimally integrated into a single architecture with StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System 6 and Brocade Extension technology. 4 | STORAGETEK VIRTUAL STORAGE MANAGER SYSTEM VERSION 6 AND BROCADE EXTENSION SOLUTIONS Brocade Extension Technology A common theme in the discussion about business continuity and disaster recovery is the need to transport data over distance between sites. These distances can range from a few, to several hundred, or to thousands of kilometers or miles. Brocade has worked with Oracle for many years to provide Oracle's StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System customers with the optimal extension technology for ESCON, FICON, and even IP-based replication. Brocade extension technologies provide StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System customers with high performance, high availability, simple management, and highly scalable extension solutions. The Brocade 7800 and FX8-24 The Brocade 7800 Extension Switch and FX8-24 Extension Blade for the Brocade DCX 8510 Backbone provide FICON extension beyond traditional distance limitations with FICON inter-switch link (ISL) extension over a Fibre Channel over Internet Protocol (FCIP) connection. This solution is very effective in configurations in which the FICON protocols and application requirements can be met, while network bandwidth and propagation delay constraints are taken into account. The Brocade 7800 and FX8-24 provide an ideal extension platform for StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System 6 and real tape drive channel extension requirements. This is particularly true for long-distance implementations that require FICON emulation techniques to improve performance over distances. FICON device emulation and read/write tape pipelining technologies available on all Brocade Extension products provide for virtually unlimited distance extension of FICON tape, a popular mainframe DASD mirroring solution. The Brocade FICON emulation and pipelining capabilities set the industry standard for FICON distance extension and are the solution of choice for thousands of mainframe enterprises around the world. These technologies expand the FICON extension capabilities of the Brocade 7800 and FX8-24 platforms and set yet another industry benchmark for extended FICON performance. Brocade Emulation Processes for FICON Access to Tapes Improved FICON protocol efficiencies reduce the number of end-to-end exchanges required to support tape operations, as compared with its antecedent ESCON and parallel channels implementation. However, many legacy access methods generate small channel programs consisting of as little as a single read or write Channel Command Word (CCW), normally preceded in a chain by an operating system-supplied mode-set command and, in some cases, a terminating no-op command. Thus, small channel programs that support tape operations are still serialized on a device basis by the command-data-status exchanges that typify tape read and write operations. While these end-to-end exchanges may be considered trivial in native FICON-attached tape implementations, they can become a significant impediment to acceptable I/O access times and bandwidth utilization for WAN-supported FICON configurations. In addition to the command-data-status exchange required to support tape operations, the effect of Information Unit (IU) pacing may also introduce additional undesirable delays in FICON-attached tape devices accessed through WAN facilities. This is true particularly for tape write operations, where outbound data frames play a significant role in the IU pacing algorithm. The Brocade suite of emulation and pipelining functions reduces the undesirable effects of latency on these exchanges and improves overall performance for WANextended FICON-attached tape and virtual tape devices. Tape pipelining refers to the concept of maintaining a series of I/O operations across a host-WAN-device environment, and it should not be confused with the normal FICON streaming of CCWs and data in a single command chain. Normally, tape access methods can be expected to read data sequentially until they reach the endof-file delimiters (tape marks) or to write data sequentially until either the data set is closed or an end-of-tape 5 | STORAGETEK VIRTUAL STORAGE MANAGER SYSTEM VERSION 6 AND BROCADE EXTENSION SOLUTIONS condition occurs (multivolume file). The emulation design strategy attempts to optimize performance for sequential reads and writes, while accommodating any other nonconforming conditions in a lower performance nonemulating frame shuttle. The Brocade FICON extension feature set includes emulation support for Oracle virtual tape, and read and write pipelining for extended FICON tape operations. A range of configurations are supported for flexible disaster recovery implementations, which can be deployed in a variety of switch environments, including FICON cascade. These configurations include: » Extension between host and remote tape controller (front-end extension) » Extension between local tape controller and remote tape library (back-end extension) » Extension between clustered systems for high availability » Brocade FICON Write Tape Pipelining Brocade ICX 6430 The Brocade ICX 6430 Switch provides an ideal extension platform for StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System 6's IP-based replication. The Brocade ICX 6430 provides feature-rich enterprise-class stackable LAN switching. Brocade Ethernet switch stacking technology helps IT organizations meet growing user demands by delivering high availability through real-time state synchronization across the stack and instantaneous hitless failover support. In addition, organizations can use hot-insertion and removal of stack members to avoid interrupting network service when adding or replacing a switch. High-performance link aggregation groups (LAGs) increase 10 GbE uplink 6 | STORAGETEK VIRTUAL STORAGE MANAGER SYSTEM VERSION 6 AND BROCADE EXTENSION SOLUTIONS bandwidth and redundancy to the core, giving users uninterrupted high performance to support the most demanding applications. Brocade Extension Management The Brocade 7800, FX8-24, and ICX 6430 all are managed from one common management tool: Brocade Network Advisor. Brocade Network Advisor is the same management tool used to manage the Brocade DCX 8510 family of FICON directors. Having a unified management platform for all the networking components in a mainframe storage architecture allows for simplified, cost-effective management. Summary Data protection is the most critical IT discipline because most businesses in the modern world can no longer survive without their IT function. As a result, the next generation of data protection solutions is coming to market as legacy processes become increasingly burdensome, expensive, and unreliable. Today’s optimum data protection solution ensures business continuity (using disk) and disaster recovery (using tape), and it provides the most cost-effective means of protecting tier 3 data (using tape) while providing foolproof network capabilities from Brocade, which enable remote site replication. Data protection throughout the lifecycle of data is not an option ― it is a requirement. Engineered with versatility as a fundamental component, StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System 6 and Brocade Extension solutions can be deployed to meet each enterprise’s unique business requirements. From high-performance disk only or massively scalable “disk + tape” configurations to single-site or multisite support, StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System 6 deployments meet each application’s specific requirements, balancing speed, capacity, and availability so that the right data is on the right device at the right cost. Oracle is the only company, along with Brocade, to offer a fully integrated disk, tape, and virtualized data protection solution with StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System 6 architecture. 7 | STORAGETEK VIRTUAL STORAGE MANAGER SYSTEM VERSION 6 AND BROCADE EXTENSION SOLUTIONS Oracle Corporation, World Headquarters Worldwide Inquiries 500 Oracle Parkway Phone: +1.650.506.7000 Redwood Shores, CA 94065, USA Fax: +1.650.506.7200 CONNECT W ITH US blogs.oracle.com/oracle facebook.com/oracle twitter.com/oracle oracle.com Copyright © 2015, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 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