Virtual Tape Meets The 24-Hour Availability Challenge.

Fueled by the growing demands of new business applications such as e-commerce and online Customer Relationship Management, the volume and value of online data is currently growing faster than many data centers can accommodate. Dynamic access to current data is more important than ever before and recent headlines confirm that information system failure can be catastrophic and costly not only for the "dot com" companies, but also for every enterprise. To further aggravate the problem, traditional batch window times that had previously accommodated business continuity processing have been sliced to the bone. There is no time for downtime.

These growing pools of information are the lifeblood of the company and the heartbeat of business continuance. Sharp businesses are becoming increasingly information centric to maintain their competitive edge. Data center managers must create and sustain storage infrastructures that will satisfy the need for continuous and immediate access to an expanding amount of data. In addition, the current corporate frenzy in mega-mergers and acquisitions presents yet another formidable management task of consolidating data centers from newly acquired companies or migrating data to new facilities to reduce costs and improve data accessibility.

How do you maintain high-speed access to current corporate information while you protect and secure business continuance with little or no downtime? New and innovative disaster recovery and data migration solutions are essential to ensure continued access and availability of vital corporate information. For real solutions to these storage challenges smart companies are turning to virtual tape.

Smooth Moves

Whether inspired by mergers, acquisitions, or simply the desire to consolidate resources, an increasing number of enterprises face the need to migrate their data centers to new locations. The task imposes difficult challenges on IT departments that must maintain 24-hour availability across the enterprise. In mainframe environments, the need to move equipment and volumes of vital data once required loading thousands and thousands of tape cartridges into a truck to begin the physical transport. Until now, the storage industry has provided solutions for easing movement of disk-based data, but tape-based data still required complex planning, downtime, and expense.

Today, there is a solution that can eliminate interruption of service and reduce the cost and complexity of migrating a data center to a new location. Virtual tape not only solves the data migration problem associated with tape-based data, but also provides data center managers with the ongoing ability to better manage their growing storage requirements. This solution makes moving your data center to a new location simple and extremely efficient through the use of two Virtual Tape Servers and a disk remote copy application to create replicate tape caches before completing the migration.

Key benefits include:

* 24-hour data availability across the enterprise

* Move-time acceleration and simplification

* Tape utilization maximization

* DASD storage maximization

* Dramatic reduction in the number of tapes to transport

* Ongoing processing performance improvements and resource optimization

A Company On The Move

As the leader in electronic commerce and payment services, First Data Corporation (FDC) helps move the world's money and they understand the importance of data accessibility. So when it came to moving their data center from Sunrise, FL to Denver, CO, First Data looked to virtual tape for a first-class migration solution (Fig 1).

Leading disk vendor remote copy facilities offered solutions for the migration of disk-based data, allowing FDC to maintain up to the minute synchronization for all online systems and data between the two sites to support the move. The real quandary was finding a solution for migrating the tape-based data.

Dennis Belanger, manager of tape resources at FDC explains, "Our biggest problem was tape--how do you move tens of thousands of tapes to a site halfway across the country in less than four hours?"

First, the Virtual Tape Server could handle over 60% of all the tape mounts for the Sunrise site. This was FDC's highest activity tape data and FDC immediately received the benefits of improved performance, a large reduction in tape consumption, and a reduced need for physical tape drives.

Since virtual tape uses disk as the tape cache for virtual tape volumes, some Virtual Tape Servers can also support attached disk remote copy facilities. It was this feature that allowed all of FDC'S active VTS volumes to be maintained in the Denver site via channel extension technology. This essentially meant that FDC could move up to 100,000 tape volumes almost instantly.

"It's hard to estimate what this unique solution saved us, but consolidating data centers will save us millions over the years. Getting the data moved securely with our systems up and running on time saved us millions of dollars per hour," reported Dennis Belanger of FDC.

Above all, the Virtual Tape data center migration solution ensured continuous operation of the enterprise, while accelerating and simplifying the migration process, but there is still more value in virtual. Virtual tape also provides a suite of comprehensive solutions and additional economic benefits that should not be overlooked, including essential solutions for Disaster Recovery.

Here's To A Speedy Recovery

In order to avert the catastrophic impact of a geographic disaster, many data centers deploy disaster recovery sites in remote locations or use the services of an outsourcing corporation that will supply the necessary facilities to rebuild and support critical business applications in the event of such a disaster.

Traditional disaster recovery processing includes time consuming system reloads from mainframe tape containing key application and system data. For the enterprise, an information system's downtime may incur costs that range in the millions of dollars in both risk-exposure and lost revenue as each second passes.

The problem here is twofold. First, you need to be able to replicate the information to the disaster site with urgency and ease, so that you do not compromise day-to-day information accessibility. Secondly, the backup facilities put in place must support instantaneous recovery, if and when it is required. How do you get your backup operations to get you back in operation on time? Virtual Tape.

Industry analysts recommend that primary backup be directed to disk as opposed to tape--to speed both the backup and recovery process. Virtual tape uses disk as tape cache and presents the image of many tape drives that have disk-like access while supporting remote copy to the disaster recovery site. This allows immediate access to cached data, so that critical files can be quickly processed for recovery and, as an added bonus, virtual tape intelligently stacks archive data on to real tape when dataset usage drops.

Since virtual tape looks like real tape to the mainframe, transition from disk to tape happens transparently--no additional application changes are required. Virtual tape provides the immediate access to the data needed to support instant recovery, while supporting cost effective archiving of inactive data to real tape. This not only results in a far superior disaster recovery solution, but also dramatically reduces the requirement for real resources on an ongoing basis (Fig 2).

Virtual Solutions: Today's Reality

A comprehensive Storage Resource Management solution, the virtual tape server consolidates data files to drastically reduce the number of tape cartridges needed. This frees up drives, accelerates data retrieval, and dramatically reduces the cost of tape-related resources and the good news doesn't stop there. Virtual tape also provides unique solutions for HSM optimization, disaster recovery, enterprise output management systems, and addresses other applications that provide today's frugal IT managers with the total cost of ownership reductions and performance improvements that are essential to support the growing needs of IT in the new millennium.

Patricia Anderson is the director of product marketing and marketing communications for the Scimitar Virtual Tape Server product line at Sutmyn Storage Corporation (Santa Clara, CA).