Features - Storage Innovations:

BUS-TECH ANNOUNCES FiCON SUPPORT ON MAS

Bus-Tech Inc, a leading supplier of data center connectivity products, announced significant enhancements to the Mainframe Appliance for Storage (MAS), a tape-on-disk controller for System/390 mainframes. The new release of the MAS offers support for FiCON, enhanced scalability and other high-performance features. MAS, in combination with emerging ATA drive technology, provides a cost effective solution for using disk for mainframe backup.

The new release of the MAS offers support for FiCON channel connection to the mainframe. Customers will benefit from FiCON's improved performance, greater distance from the mainframe while maintaining end-to-end performance and use of standard fibre channel technology for implementing data center infrastructure. Additional features will allow the MAS to scale beyond two petabytes and techniques to quickly retrieve information on large virtual tape files without having to sequentially read the "tape" files.

The MAS operates as a tape sub-system on IBM's System/390 or zSeries mainframes. The MAS connects directly to System/390 through one or two FiCON or ESCON attachments and emulates up to 64 IBM tape drives. Applications running under z/OS, OS/390 or VSE, can attach to one of these drives and use it as they would a real tape drive. But instead of creating or reading real tape cartridges the MAS stores application tape files on open system disk platforms such as IBM's FAStT, Network Appliance NearStor, Storage Tek's BladeStor and EMC's CLARiiON. Minimal change is required to support existing applications or operations. The new release of MAS and FiCON will begin shipping in mid November.