Back to the Future

I've been spending a lot of time 'talking mainframe' lately. The rumored union of IBM and Sun seems to have stirred the pot on mainframe backup. IT managers that have relied on these companies for data protection want to know what's going to happen to tape silo and VTL products from both companies, some of which were already on their way to end of life or even end of support anyway.

The mainframe discussion is not new for Data Domain - we've had a strong partnership with Luminex for a few years now and are consistently winning business together. We recently published a new case study that highlights how the joint solution can get customers out of mainframe tape backup altogether - in this case retiring a number of expensive IBM tape drives and its VTS infrastructure. It's a good read unless of course you happen to be a tape vendor - perhaps a Dean Koontz novel would be a little less scary.

Comments

[Art Tolsma]

Hi Shane. As I read my way through my morning blogs it is great to see your new post. You are right on target that the industry buzz and uncertainty about Sun’s future is causing a lot of enterprises to look at their mainframe tape environment again.

The trend away from proprietary physical tape and towards the compelling values of deduplication for mainframe data is not new, and is accelerating. For members of the SHARE user group, another good way to see what other organizations are doing is to download the recent session proceedings “SHARE Virtual Tape Across the Enterprise” and “Mainframe Tape without Tapes.”