Jon Perryman wrote:
> Since there are lots of reasons, can you name 3 beyond those
>I mentioned? "Save money? Offsite backup? It's new technology?
>Don't need to worry because it's the cloud? They want to say they
>are cloud enabled?"

How about everything else works this way (including z/OS), they don’t want z/VM 
to be different/exceptional (not in this respect), and they have greater 
confidence/assurance that their backups will be better secured/encrypted and 
better protected from local disasters this way?

Why does Iron Mountain exist and thrive? It’s the same basic set of reasons.

> I suspect Ayre is saying cloud but I doubt Ayre has a specific cloud solution
>in mind nor implied "cloud object storage".

Cloud object storage is what the public commercial clouds (also) all provide 
for backup data storage/retrieval. Cloud object storage is the service, and 
then that service can be provided by public commercial clouds (e.g. Amazon S3), 
privately hosted cloud object stores, or some combination.

>Implementing a new feature request takes time (Potentially years).

Potentially, but that’s not a reason to skip filing a feature enhancement 
request. It’s a great reason to file a request now rather than later.

>The obvious problem is maintaining a TS7700 in another country and
>moving it if that country becomes a problem.

No more or less obvious than the already extant requirement to maintain a 
suitably configured IBM Z server with sufficient storage in an alternate site 
to restore the data, recover, and resume service. This emergency infrastructure 
(server, storage, network, etc.) could be customer owned, leased, or 
contracted/shared/multi-tenant. The IBM TS7700 is available and supported 
worldwide (with the obvious very few exceptions), and it’s the most popular 
virtual tape solution for these servers.

Note that it is possible for TS7700 equipment to replicate with each other AND 
to provide cloud tiering, to do both. The former would speed restoration and 
recovery since some or all of the backup would be locally available on the 
emergency infrastructure — but still able to pull from cloud object storage if 
need be. You can think of this approach as adding a cross-site replicating 
cloud object storage cache, and it’s quite lovely really.

....But all we can do is list the various viable options then let the client 
decide whether any of these few options are worthy of selection or if inertia 
will rule. I understand the client doesn’t like any of the options available, 
but they seem to be the available options. So it’s probably time to choose 
their “least worst” but still viable option and get on with it.

—————
Timothy Sipples
Senior Architect
Digital Assets, Industry Solutions, and Cybersecurity
IBM zSystems/LinuxONE, Asia-Pacific
[email protected]


----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN

Reply via email to