CA Cloud Storage for IBM System Z

CA Technologies (CA, Inc.) announced the availability of technology designed to help customers drive down the cost of storing data processed on IBM System z by backing up the data and archiving it to the cloud.

CA Cloud Storage for System z, when used with AWS cloud storage and the Riverbed Whitewater cloud storage appliance, helps customers lower storage costs to pennies per gigabyte. In addition, DR readiness is improved and AWS cloud storage is accessed without changing the existing backup infrastructure.

“Increasing data center costs around storage is a substantial pain point for our System z customers as the drive toward big data continues,” said Michael Madden, GM, mainframe, CA. “This innovation not only shrinks storage costs and eliminates expensive, purpose-built robots and disks, it also delivers the elastic capacity and flexibility the dynamic data center demands to respond to business needs across the enterprise.”

Whitewater is a storage appliance that helps integrate cloud storage infrastructures to deliver recovery and storage for backup and archive data. By using Cloud Ctorage for System z and this appliance, customers can backup System z storage data to Amazon S3, a storage infrastructure designed for mission and primary storage, or to Glacier, a low-cost storage service for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable. Both services are scalable and designed for 99.999999999% durability.

“As we deploy CA Cloud Storage for System z with offerings from AWS and Riverbed, we will get a scalable and comprehensive solution that will reduce the cost of our own backups. In addition, we can achieve other benefits of elastic storage which will allow for an improved DR posture and for faster response to business needs without having to depend on offsite tape recalls,” said Mark Behrje, global information services, CA.

“This is a great demonstration of innovation and cross ecosystem collaboration. Customers who combine CA Technologies and Riverbed offerings can couple their legacy mainframe environments with AWS. We are thrilled to see the high value of these combined technologies delivered to our customers,” said Brian Matsubara, head of global technology alliances, AWS. “Customers who pair CA Technologies System z storage technology with AWS services can benefit from the performance, durability and cost efficiencies of the cloud.”

It’s designed to:

• Cut storage costs by taking advantage of the AWS offers such as capacity on demand and reduced dependency on storage media.

• Speed ability to access, store, retrieve and recover storage data, increasing velocity tos from the hours or days physical media recovery can take.

• Reduce data center risk by storing data off-site, while addressing guidelines for long-term data retention.

• Operate with current applications that store and retrieve data without programming changes.

• Reduce storage size and network bandwidth requirements with dedupe algorithms and the number of bytes sent into the cloud.

“Reducing operational burden while improving backup durability and recovery options will ease the minds of mainframe customers as they transition to cloud storage,” said John Martin, SVP and GM, storage delivery, Riverbed. “By leveraging Riverbed Whitewater, organizations can pay up to 30 times less on cloud storage fees while gaining the ability to recover data in minutes instead of hours or days.”

“We just helped install CA cloud Storage for System z with a large energy company running two z10s in a GDPS sysplex,” said Tom Amodio, president, Vicom Infinity, Inc. “It’s exciting to be able to go into a customer shop and install a solution like this with so little effort. It is also exciting to be part of a new technology offering that provides IBM mainframe customers with simple and cost effective technologies for moving their data offsite. This is great example of the resiliency and flexibility of the System z platform.”

CA Expands Support for AWS Ecosystem
The company remains committed to supporting the AWS ecosystem by delivering a set of solutions to help businesses manage, monitor and secure AWS resources. The solutions are available in the AWS Marketplace.