IBM TS7700 Release 4.0 Guide

This IBM® Redbooks® publication highlights IBM TS7700 Release 4.0. The IBM TS7700 is part of a family of IBM Enterprise tape products. This book is intended for system architects and storage administrators who want to integrate their storage systems for optimal operation.

The IBM TS7700 offers a modular, scalable, and high-performance architecture for mainframe tape virtualization for the IBM z™ Systems environment. It is a fully integrated, tiered storage hierarchy of disk and tape. This storage hierarchy is managed by robust storage management microcode with extensive self-management capability. It includes the following advanced functions:

Policy management to control physical volume pooling
Cache management
Redundant copies, including across a grid network
Copy mode control

The IBM TS7700 offers enhanced statistical reporting. It also includes a standards-based Management Interface (MI) for IBM TS7700 management. IBM TS7700 R4.0 continues the next generation of IBM TS7700 for z Systems® tape:

The IBM TS7760 is an all new hardware refresh and features Encryption Capable, high-capacity cache that uses 4 TB serial-attached Small Computer System Interface (SAS) HDDs in arrays that use dynamic disk pool configuration. This setup can scale to large capacities with the highest level of data protection.
Release 4.0 introduces the option to attach to a TS4500 tape library, and to the previous TS3500 tape library, which contains back-end physical tape drives and policies to manage up to eight of the disk repositories in a tape-attached TS7760T. This TS7760T (Tape Attached) configuration mimics the behavior of a TS7740, with additional features that go beyond what a TS7740 can provide.

The TS7760T writes data by policy to physical tape through attachment to high-capacity, high-performance IBM TS1150 and IBM TS1140 tape drives installed in an IBM TS4500 or TS3500 tape library.
The TS7760 models are based on high-performance and redundant IBM POWER8® technology. They provide improved performance for most z Systems tape workloads when compared to the previous generations of IBM TS7700.