Originating Author: Fred Moore
The requirement for a centralized, end-to-end storage management solution using a “single pane of glass” for mainframe and non-mainframe systems that really works across multiple operating systems could not be greater! Many of the tried and proven mainframe storage capabilities are just finding their way into non-mainframe systems. Concepts such as HSM, CDP (Continuous Data Protection), snapshot copy, data classification, tiered storage and virtual tape have been well-established for 20 years or more. What’s taking so long?
Beyond mainframes, Unix operating systems host more critical, data-intensive applications than any other operating system. The storage services provided by Unix that are present today are basically the same ones that existed over 20 years ago when Sun Microsystems first released NFS (Network File System) and have seen little improvement since. No one knew then that these distributed computing systems would one day be asked to do the work of a mainframe and to access as much data as their mainframe counterparts, if not more. There have been few significant enhancements to non-mainframe operating systems in terms of storage services for several years.
The Unix, Linux and Windows (formerly called open systems) storage environments have become increasingly larger and now account for roughly 90 percent of all disk capacity shipped annually. As a result of this growth, a non-mainframe equivalent of DFSMS (Data Facility Storage Management Subsystem) has become highly desirable and is now long overdue. For years, the policy-based DFSMS has been widely used on mainframe computers, providing powerful improvements in storage management capability. It is now time for non-mainframe computers to provide comparable and powerful mainframe-like storage management functions as they control major storage environments and the vast majority of digital data. Surprisingly, any specific effort in this direction is not readily apparent.
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