Oracle has announced the StorageTek Virtual Library Extension (VLE), the industry’s first highly scalable second tier of disk storage that optimizes tape processing in mainframe environments.

With today’s announcement, Oracle delivers two times the disk scalability to boost performance and accommodate growing workloads and five times the availability of IBM mainframe tape solutions to provide the enterprise reliability that customers require.

Oracle provides the only mainframe solution that offers a completely integrated three-tier approach to storage (FC disk, SAS disk and tape) in a single solution that simplifies management and provides better performance at a lower cost than offerings from other vendors.

With the new StorageTek Virtual Library Extension, customers can economically keep active data on disk longer before migrating it to tape for long term storage. Integrated with the third storage tier of tape for a complete solution, customers can expect to see two times the cost savings of a disk-only solution.

The StorageTek Virtual Library Extension expands Oracle’s StorageTek product family, which delivers the most scalable, cost efficient and energy-efficient storage solutions for heterogeneous data protection, consolidation and archiving.

StorageTek tape libraries support both mainframe and non-mainframe environments within a single library, providing an integrated data protection solution with Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle 11g Recovery Manager and Oracle Secure Backup software running with Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux, as well as with leading third-party operating systems, open systems storage management products, and mainframe storage management software.

Maximize Scale and Data Protection, Simplify Management and Lower Costs

The addition of the StorageTek Virtual Library Extension to a Virtual Storage Manager environment provides up to an additional 3.5PB of effective disk storage space, giving customers more seamless disk buffer scalability to effectively manage growth and increase performance while reducing costs. It provides two times the disk scalability of other mainframe virtual tape solutions to better handle customers’ growing workloads.

The integrated Virtual Storage Manager / Virtual Library Extension environment is the only mainframe virtual tape solution that provides a single, policy-based management interface that migrates data between high-performance disk, high-capacity disk and tape tiers.

The StorageTek Virtual Library Extension maximizes data protection and availability by leveraging the unique Virtual Storage Manager architecture that enables data to be dynamically stored and protected in multiple tiers of storage and at multiple locations without involving the mainframe. The product uses Oracle’s Solaris ZFS technology to provide higher reliability with Triple-Parity RAID-Z3, which delivers five times more data reliability than IBM systems using RAID-6.

Oracle’s Virtual Library Extension / Virtual Storage Manager environment in combination with Oracle’s leading tape portfolio delivers more than two times the scalability of IBM’s mainframe virtual tape solutions and five times the scalability of IBM’s tape automation solutions.

Supporting Quotes

“Since its inception more than 40 years ago, the StorageTek mainframe storage business has been a driving force behind innovation in the industry,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, Oracle. “This innovative approach to mainframe tiered storage provides customers with a way to cost-effectively keep data on disk for longer time period while still leveraging the long term cost savings of tape.”

“Oracle continues to address the needs of mainframe virtual tape customers,” said Robert Amatruda, research director, data protection and recovery, IDC. “Oracle’s StorageTek Virtual Library Extension provides an innovative and cost-effective approach by adding a second tier of disk to its StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager products.”