Highlights
- Can help reduce “real” tape mounts, because many mount requests are satisfied from the Tape Volume Cache (TVC)
- Can reduce physical tape cartridges required because of higher utilization of cartridge capacity
- Can help reduce operating costs such as power, maintenance, operations and support staff
- Peer-to-Peer configuration supports business continuity for IBM System z™ environments
- Can help to improve performance due to the elimination of most of the physical movement of tape
- Low entry cost configuration with upgrade path supports growth
- Peer-to-Peer configuration supports business continuity for IBM System z™ environments
The IBM TotalStorage® Virtual Tape Server Model B20 (B20 VTS) is an enterprise tape solution designed to enhance performance and provide the capacity needed for today’s backup requirements. Adoption of this solution can help reduce batch processing time, total cost of ownership and management overhead. Automation of a larger portion of a company's data storage may also be facilitated in a shorter period of time.
The B20 VTS has been designed to reduce or eliminate the number of bottlenecks that may be present in a given tape environment, depending on the characteristics of installed equipment and processor workloads. For example, if more drives are needed, up to 256 virtual drives may be configured to meet this need. If cartridge capacity is not fully utilized, the B20 VTS can alleviate this problem by filling physical cartridges.
The B20 VTS initially creates a virtual volume in a buffer known as the Tape Volume Cache (TVC), a RAID-5 disk array. If these virtual volumes are re-referenced, they are accessed in most instances from the TVC, which helps to eliminate many of the physical delays associated with tape I/O and improves the performance of the tape process
| Common features
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Maximum of 256 virtual drives and 500,000 virtual volumes
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Advanced policy management, including cache management and volume pooling
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IBM TotalStorage Tape Library Specialist, a web-based user interface to library manager
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Peer-to-Peer Virtual Tape Server environment
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IBM TS3000 System Console for remote management and monitoring
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| Hardware summary
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Up to 5.2 TB tape volume cache
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Up to 8 FICON channels
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Up to 16 ESCON channels
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Up to 12 3590 or 3592 tape drives
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