Ficon Tape Acceleration - Cisco AP776A - Nexus Converged Network Switch 5020 Configuration Manual

FICON Tape Acceleration

S e n d d o c u m e n t a t i o n c o m m e n t s t o m d s f e e d b a c k - d o c @ c i s c o . c o m
Step 3 Issue the no shutdown command on each port to enable traffic flow.
Note
FICON Tape Acceleration
The sequential nature of tape devices causes each I/O operation to the tape device over an FCIP link to
incur the latency of the FCIP link. Throughput drastically decreases as the round-trip time through the
FCIP link increases, leading to longer backup windows. Also, after each I/O operation, the tape device
is idle until the next I/O arrives. Starting and stopping of the tape head reduces the lifespan of the tape,
except when I/O operations are directed to a virtual tape.
Cisco MDS NX-OS software provides acceleration for the following FICON tape write operations:
•
•
FICON tape acceleration over FCIP provides the following advantages:
•
•
•
FICON tape read acceleration over FCIP is not supported.
Note
Figure 29-5
Figure 29-5
IBM
OS/390
Figure 29-6
Cisco MDS 9000 Family CLI Configuration Guide
29-38
If you specify the ficon swap interface old-interface new-interface after swap noshut
command, the ports are automatically initialized.
The link between mainframe and native tape drives (both IBM and Sun/STK)
The back-end link between the VSM (Virtual Storage Management) and tape drive (Sun/STK)
Efficiently utilizes the tape device by decreasing idle time
More sustained throughput as latency increases
Similar to FCP tape acceleration, and does not conflict with it
through Figure 29-8
Host Directly Accessing IBM/STK (StorageTek) Library
FICON
Cisco MDS
Host Accessing Standalone IBM-VTS (Virtual Tape Server) /STK-VSM (Virtual Shared
Memory)
FICON over
FCIP
VSM
show supported configurations:
FICON over
FCIP
FICON over
FCIP
Chapter 29
FICON
Tape library
Cisco MDS
Cisco MDS Tape library
OL-18084-01, Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 4.x
Configuring FICON