VSM—A New Storage Technology for the OS/390 (MVS) Systems

CIT recently acquired a new storage system, Storage Technology Corporation’s virtual storage manager (VSM), for the MVS environ-ments at the NIH Computer Center. VSM is a comprehensive system of tape storage—consisting of tape silos, disk buffers, new tape technology and tape management—that improves performance and reduces human intervention in storing, retrieving and mounting tapes.

Over the next six months, CIT will be implementing this new storage technology in the MVS North system and the OS/390 (MVS) standard system environments. VSM will be implemented for the MVS South system in 2001. Our goal is to make the transition to the new VSM environment as transparent as possible to our customers.

VSM will effectively reduce the size of our large combined tape library, which contains approximately 200,000 tape volumes. In addition, VSM utilizes disk buffering capabilities and will allow tape activity to process with the speed of disks.

Please watch for updates in future Interface articles. A Web page will soon be available at http:/silk.nih.gov/silk/vsm.

Interface 213 (March 15, 2000)