Rewinding this discussion a bit, to my knowledge there's only one locally FICON-attached physical tape solution for z/OS from one vendor that's still in active development. The current iteration is IBM TS7770+IBM TS4500+IBM TS1150.
Physical tape is still extremely useful, even more useful than ever. Physical tape cartridges are comparatively economical, durable, portable, and expressly designed to be electrically unplugged/disconnected. Physical tape is really the only practical last line of defense against malware, ransomware, corruption, and other data destroying events. For the sake of completeness (I haven't seen anyone mention it yet), I believe Fujitsu's ETERNUS CS8000 is still at least notionally available and can support physical tape, including IBM's physical tape. However, encrypted cloud object storage, typically backed with physical tape (which usually ends up holding most of the exabytes), is now well established and quite compelling. A few of the IBM products in this category include IBM DS8000 Transparent Cloud Tiering, IBM TS7700 Transparent Cloud Tiering, and Cloud Tape Connector for z/OS. Please note that "cloud" can mean any cloud(s), including your own private cloud. If you're considering storage-related improvements I suggest you embrace cloud object storage. - - - - - - - - - - Timothy Sipples I.T. Architect Executive Digital Asset & Other Industry Solutions IBM Z & LinuxONE - - - - - - - - - - E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
