Overview

CA Cloud Storage for System z lets you use cloud storage for your z/OS mainframe virtual tape volumes. Public cloud storage is elastic and lets you increase or decrease your capacity dynamically. A private cloud is under your control to configure the way that you want. You can use any combination of both public and private cloud storage.

CA Cloud Storage for System z is comprised of CA Vtape on z/OS and an application server that runs on Linux on System z. CA Vtape on z/OS uses its patented zIIP enabled Virtual I/O engine to off-load tape data in real time to Linux on System z over a Channel-to-Channel (CTC) adapter. The Linux Server does I/O to files that represent the z/OS virtual volumes as standard Linux files. These files are intended to be on CIFS shares-NFS mount points (CIFS and NFS are collectively referred to as mount points).

Virtual volumes are directed to a mount point by volume serial range. You have the flexibility to use one or more mount points by assigning volume serial ranges to those mount points. CA Vtape on z/OS is able to assign virtual volume serial ranges through its dataset and data class policy-based filters. This lets you decide what z/OS applications and workloads get assigned to which mount point.

The mount point storage is accessed at local disk speed. Each mount point can be mapped to a different gateway appliance. These appliances provide features such as data compression, data de-duplication, data encryption, and data replication. Deciding what features to exploit is up to you.