Dell EMC Announce DLm 4.5 To “Eliminate” Physical Tape

by Adam Armstrong March 6, 2017

written by Adam Armstrong March 6, 2017

Today at SHARE 2017, Dell EMC announced the latest version of its Disk Library for mainframe (DLm) virtual tape, version 4.5. The latest version of Dell EMC’s cloud-based virtual tape is aiming to replace physical tape as the go to long-term retention strategy. Dell EMC states that DLm 4.5 can make the mainframe data center more efficient by moving mainframe virtual tape data to the cloud.

Tape has been around for a long time, since the 1950s. It is reliable, cost effective, and offered the capacity need for large long-term storage (one tape can offer up to 185TB of capacity). But from an innovation stand point, tape does not get the attention or innovation that is seen in disk, flash, or the cloud. Dell EMC came up with the concept of 100% disk to replace tape or virtual tape. Though long-term retention (5 to 10 years or more) still favored physical tape. But as technology continues to advance in areas such as cloud, there could potentially be a modern, better alternative to physical tape.

For non-mainframe environments, Cloud technology (both public and private) has proven itself to be reliable, low-cost, and have enough capacity for long-term retention. One of the big concerns with cloud has been security, but with time cloud has proven itself to be secure as well. A big advantage of cloud over tape is performance. DLm 4.5 has been proven and is secure, and enables mainframe data centers to take advantage of new or existing cloud infrastructures to eliminate the need for physical tape.

Version 4.5 also has added support for Data Domain DD6300, DD6800, DD9300 and DD9800 as well as support for Data Domain High Availability (HA).

Dell EMC Solutions for Mainframes

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