Fujitsu has announced the latest version of its long-established Eternus CS8000 backup and archiving platform, designed for mainframes and demanding open system environments.
Based on customer feedback, enhancements to the 7th generation system deliver expanded scalability, increased front-end processor nodes and support for solid state drives (SSDs) for internal disk storage. The resulting data protection infrastructure consolidation allows customers to benefit from significant total cost of ownership (TCO) savings.
Although data is crucial across all market sectors, for some organizations, it is the very core of their business – for example stock exchanges, financial services, insurance companies and air traffic control systems.
These organisations have the most stringent data protection requirements and usually store essential data on-premises. Fujitsu’s flagship Eternus CS8000 – already the most versatile solution of its kind, allows customers to optimize their systems as their requirements evolve while providing additional options for consolidating backup and archiving across mainframes and open systems. The administration time and infrastructure cost saved translate to savings of up to 40%.
The 7th generation Eternus CS8000 now offers the ability to scale capacity from 14 Terabytes up to more than 60 Petabytes – a factor of 400 000%.
Performance can also be increased from 8TB per hour to a throughput of 150TB per hour – representing 1,800 percent scalability for actual data transfer and recovery operations.
In addition, Fujitsu has ramped up the internal processor nodes and flexibility of internal software, increasing the number of available front-end processors nodes in the Eternus CS8000 from 10 to 22. This also boosts the number of virtual tape drives available, more than doubling the total from an already market-leading 2540 to approximately 5208. The resulting increase in parallel data streams results in dramatically shorter backup times.
Olivier Delachapelle, head of category management: data center products at Fujitsu EMEIA, says: “Mainframes continue to be the foundation of many businesses’ critical IT infrastructures as they support the most essential workloads. However, today’s IT leaders are challenged with simultaneously having to reduce IT costs while increasing flexibility. The Eternus CS8000 is designed with those objectives in mind – helping customers both consolidate the infrastructure needed to backup and archive data from both mainframe and open systems and easily adapt to accommodate changing demands.
“In addition, customers can now store data on a combination of disks, tapes and SSDs and benefit from accelerated backup and archive process thanks to the enhanced speed and performance of this latest version.”
The Eternus CS8000 now also incorporates support for solid state disks (SSDs) – to improve the performance of the optional deduplication processes and to deliver even greater benefits for mainframe environments. Long term data can be stored cost-effectively on the Eternus CS8000’s back-end on tape – fully managed by the automated Information Lifecycle Management, while faster SSDs can be used for mainframe processes on the system’s backup storage – making the Eternus CS8000 even more attractive for mainframe backup, even in smaller environments.
The Information Lifecycle Management also eliminates human error by automating the handling of data across all its lifecycle stages and ensures data availability, as for example, all tapes are regularly checked in case of media degradation, with the automatic creation of new copies when required. For an additional level of data availability the split-site configuration makes it possible to distribute a single Eternus CS8000 system across two separate geographic sites with synchronous cache-mirror. Enhanced by multi-copy management on disk and tape, this type of deployment has no single point of failure, representing the most reliable backup and archive solution to protect mission-critical data for mainframe or open system environments.