Amazon’s S3 has accelerated adoption of Object Storage and expanded the use cases for technologies like HCP. I’d like to highlight several solutions that have built-in S3 tiering/backup functionality that can utilize HCP for cloud storage.

I know one of the questions I will be asked is “are these solutions certified?” The answer is “no” or "not yet". Certification between platforms is becoming less and less likely (and less required) as a result of the proliferation and adoption of the S3 API and the cloud storage platforms using it. So don’t let that stop you from talking to clients about them.

• Oracle’s “Secure Backup Cloud Module” (OSBC) allows customers store backups to “Cloud Storage” using RMAN’s SBT interface. One of the best write-ups on “Why Backup to Cloud Storage” is included on page 4 of Oracle’s White Paper on their OSBC module, have a read and use it when talking to your customers about backup up data to “clouds”.

• IBM Cloud Tape Connector for z/OS V1.1 is a new software offering that lets customers take advantage of the flexibility and economics of cloud storage for the z/OS mainframe environment. Cloud Tape Connector enables tape data to be easily copied to one of the popular cloud storage environments (Hitachi HCP, IBMCleversafe®, IBM SoftLayer®, Amazon S#) where it can be easily and quickly recalled, and where data status can be monitored. IBM Cloud Tape Connector for z/OS can be used for any z/OS data that can be written out to tape (it is not restricted to DFSMS-managed data).

Jim Ash @9XJim

Hitachi Data Systems