IBM (NYSE: IBM) is bringing data deduplication to its System z mainframes.
Big Blue is taking the dedupe technology from its Diligent acquisition and porting it to z/OS mainframe environments with the new System Storage TS7680 ProtecTIER Deduplication Gateway for System z. IBM claims as much as a 25 to 1 deduplication ratio for the new offering.
EMC’s (NYSE: EMC) Data Domain unit has dabbled in mainframe deduplication, while Bus-Tech has worked on mainframe dedupe with Quantum (NYSE: QTM) and FalconStor (NASDAQ: FALC).
The TS7680 combines a virtual tape library (VTL) solution with an inline data deduplication algorithm called HyperFactor, which IBM said indexes the complete content of a repository and can be permanently hosted in the RAM because of its small size. The TS7680 also features two-node clustering and up to one petabyte of physical storage capacity per system.
IBM says the combination of virtual tape and data deduplication can speed backup and recovery operations and reduce the costs of tape processing operations by using disk storage as a repository for the deduplicated data, so applications can complete faster and speed the batch-processing window.
Virtual tape systems will be seen by the mainframe as a standard tape library, so existing backup processes don’t need to change to accommodate the systems.
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