Luminex to Enhance Mainframe De-Dupe DR Management

LUMINEX Software, Inc., developer and provider of the Channel Gateway Modern Mainframe Virtual Tape products, enhanced enterprise features of their Channel Gateway products. These new features and capabilities include real-time local and remote status monitoring of tape availability and integrity at a remote disaster recovery location and ‘Synchronous Copy‘ capability in which local tape operations complete only after replicated tape data is validated to be available.

The LUMINEX Channel Gateway with deduplication storage ensures that data is available at the remote location sooner and more cost-effectively than mainframe tape solutions from any other vendor. Channel Gateway customers are now experiencing significantly improved disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities using disk-based deduplication and replication compared to the traditional methods of creating and shipping physical tapes. Existing customers of this LUMINEX-based mainframe deduplication solution frequently report tape data availability at the remote location within minutes of the production mainframe tape operations.

Mainframe datacenters want to take full advantage of this remote data availability by optimizing their disaster recovery practices. With the new Channel Gateway capabilities, customers can take advantage of the reality that tape data is available at a remote location in near real-time. The Channel Gateway provides improved knowledge and management of the tape data consistency points between the production and remote disaster recovery locations. This includes new features such as real-time status updates at both the local and remote site of which tapes are potentially not consistent at both locations.

In addition, LUMINEX has implemented ‘Synchronous Copy’ capabilities to enforce tape data consistency across replicated storage systems. Local tape write operations will complete at the primary mainframe only when the replicated copy is validated to be available at the secondary location. This ensures that for those datacenters that keep the tape catalog synchronized at a remote location, this tape catalogue will be current and the tape data will be consistent and usable if needed.

"LUMINEX continues to lead the industry with our Channel Gateway in terms of performance, features, and quality and our products are being rapidly embraced by mainframe datacenters across the globe," stated Art Tolsma, LUMINEX’s CEO. "This announcement demonstrates our continuous commitment to meet the real-world needs of enterprise mainframe datacenter customers."

The new Channel Gateway enhancements are expected to be generally available to current and new customers before the end of June, 2010.