AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
How Cloud Backup for Mainframes Cuts Costs with BMC AMI Cloud Data and AWS
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| BMC Software |
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By Gil Peleg, Sr. Director of Product Management – BMC AMI Cloud
By Sunil Bemarkar, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
Mainframe cold storage based on disks and tapes is typically expensive and rigid. BMC Software is an AWS Specialization Partner with the Migration and Modernization Competency that improves the economics and flexibility by leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) storage for archival, backup, and recovery of mainframe data.
Without any additional hardware component, BMC AMI Cloud Data securely transfers mainframe backup or archive data from the mainframe to AWS Cloud storage over TCP/IP.
In this post, I will describe the BMC AMI Cloud Data solution along with customer use cases and benefits. It enables mainframe customers to leverage modern cloud technologies and economics to reduce data recovery risks and improve application availability by providing a software-defined solution for archive, backup, and recovery directly from AWS.
We help customers dramatically cut mainframe data management costs by running on zIIP engines, using affordable cloud storage and simplifying daily operations via an easy-to-use user interface (UI).
Mainframe Customer Storage Challenges
Since the 1970s, due to costs and limited capacity of storage devices, physical tapes were the only practical solution for archiving and creating additional copies of data. As the years went by, virtual tapes were introduced, enabling automation, improving tape utilization, and faster backup times. These were still technically treated as a physical media, however. For this reason, mainframe backup and archive architecture still suffers from limitations and inefficiencies and incurs high costs.
The mainframe virtual tape library (VTL) has limitations; it relies on a proprietary FICON protocol and emulates proprietary devices, so it cannot be shared with other platforms. This results in inefficiencies and high costs.
The backup, archive, and space management software also contribute to million service units per hour (MSU) consumption. Therefore, customers end up paying 3-5 times more for their mainframe VTL storage compared to distributed storage systems.
BMC AMI Cloud Data Solution
The BMC AMI Cloud patented technology connects the mainframe directly over TCP/IP to AWS Cloud storage, allowing you to supplement or completely eliminate the need for VTLs and physical tapes.
Figure 1 – BMC AMI Cloud Data overview.
BMC AMI Cloud Data performs backup, restore, archive (migrate), and automatic recall for all z/OS data sets and volume types. This including z/OS UNIX file-level backup and restore, space management, and stand-alone restore.
With BMC AMI Cloud Data, you can take advantage of any AWS storage service from affordable long-term Amazon Glacier storage to highly-durable, scalaAmazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) are also supported.
BMC AMI Cloud Data consolidates the functionality of multiple backup and tape management products into a single solution that can reduce software costs by up to 60 percent, and provides either added capabilities such as archive to cloud, or a complete replacement of existing backup and tape management software. BMC AMI Cloud Data can coexist side-by-side legacy backup and tape management products for simplified migration.
BMC AMI Cloud Management runs on a Linux Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance and provides a single point of control for all your backup and archive operations. Its dashboard helps you quickly realize the system’s health and whether your data is protected. It also provides detailed reports and insights about your environment.
Users can leverage the web-based UI to quickly search for data sets and volumes and restore a required copy directly from AWS.
BMC AMI Cloud Data Use Cases
Customers use BMC AMI Cloud Data for different purposes. Some use it for archiving, while others use it to create a backup copy in the cloud to protect from cyber threats. Some even use it as a complete replacement for their legacy software
In this next section, we describe the different use cases for BMC AMI Cloud Data.
Archive to Cold Storage on AWS
To maximize your benefit of cloud economics, cold storage tiers such as Amazon Glacier Deep Archive are supported and, when combined, provide a software-only, cost-effective alternative backup and archive compared to on-premises tapes.
BMC AMI Cloud Data supports data set archive (migrate) directly to AWS Cloud storage, and provides an automatic recall function transparent to TSO/E and batch applications. The automatic recall function is integrated seamlessly with the system catalog and data sets appear as migrated to cloud.
Figure 2 – z/OS datasets archived by BMC AMI Cloud Data with volume M9ARCHC.
Archiving data sets directly to AWS reduces costs by reducing VTL storage capacity and throughput licenses, while maintaining durable data copies that are available for retrieval directly from the cloud, including in disaster recovery (DR) situations.
Cyber Threat Protection and Business Resumption
BMC AMI Cloud Data provides an industry-first solution for mainframe cyber threat protection and business resumption, enabling z/OS customers to create secured, off-platform backup copies in Amazon Glacier Vault Lock.
Amazon Glacier Vault Lock allows you to easily lock Amazon Glacier vaults to prevent unwanted changes. You can specify Write Once Read Many (WORM) controls to prevent data deletion or overwriting, and lock the policy from future edits
Backup and Disaster Recovery Directly from AWS
BMC AMI Cloud Data allows you to replace legacy backup (such as IBM DFHSM, CA-Disk, FDR/ABR), tape management (IBM RMM, CA-1, CA-TLMS, BMC Control-M/Tape), encryption, and reporting software products into a single modern backup solution. Store backups directly on Amazon S3.
AWS is directly accessible from your mainframe and no additional hardware, disk, or tape emulation layers is required.
Figure 3 – Amazon S3 bucket showing datasets archived with BMC AMI Cloud Data.
In DR situations, a stand-alone restore program is IPL’ed over the network and directly from the BMC AMI Cloud Data management server—using the HMC “Load from removable media or server” standard action. The stand-alone restore program is used to restore volumes and data sets without requiring the backup agent to be running in z/OS.
BMC AMI Cloud Data and AWS Technical Architecture
The BMC AMI Cloud Agent runs on the mainframe, and BMC AMI Cloud Data can store data in object storage such as Amazon S3. Figure 4 shows the architecture when storing data in S3 directly.
Figure 4 – BMC AMI Cloud Ddata storing data in Amazon S3 object storage.
The virtual private network (VPN) connection is typically configured between the on-premises router VPN client and the VPN gateway.
The BMC AMI Cloud Agent is a zIIP-eligible Java application running on z/OS that performs its actions using standard z/OS data management services. The Backup Agent uses DFDSS as the underlying data mover to provide support for all z/OS data set and volume types. It’s also fully compliant with existing SMS policy, properly updates the system catalog and relies on RACF authorization controls (or other SAF-compliant security products) for security.
When available, the BMC AMI Cloud Agent utilizes the zEDC and CryptoExpress cards for compression and encryption. If the cards are not available, compression and encryption are performed on zIIP engines to reduce costs.
The Management Server provides management, audit, and reporting capabilities, and can drive site recovery in case your mainframe is down. It communicates with the agents running in z/OS over secured TCP/IP connection. The Management Server can run on regular Linux or Linux for IBM Z and provides APIs to easily integrate with monitoring and DevOps tools.
Quality of Service for Data Security and Durability
Amazon S3 stores objects on multiple devices across multiple facilities in an S3 region. It’s designed for primary and mission-critical data storage, and ensures high durability with 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over the year. To ensure the integrity of the data, S3 verifies checksums and repairs the data using redundant data in case of corruption. SSL encryption protects data in transit, while Server-Side Encryption with Amazon S3-Managed Keys (SSE-S3) and Server-Side Encryption with AWS KMS-Managed Keys (SSE-KMS) protect data at rest.
For enhanced data protection, Amazon Glacier Vault Lock provides WORM capabilities, preventing data from being changed or deleted until its retention policy expires. BMC AMI Cloud Data supports storage of data in Amazon Glacier Vault Lock, providing an additional layer of protection from cyber threats and data corruption
Moreover, BMC AMI Cloud is fully compatible with the IBM Z164 Pervasive Encryption (PE) features. Customers leveraging PE can still benefit from BMC AMI Cloud Data backup and archive directly to AWS Cloud storage, while maintaining end-to-end data encryption controlled by z/OS.
From a performance perspective, BMC AMI Cloud Data heavily parallelizes data transfers and uploads multiple objects in parallel. For increased and consistent network bandwidth throughput with AWS, it’s recommended to establish a dedicated private network connection between AWS and the mainframe datacenter network using AWS Direct Connect.
Transition to Using BMC AMI Cloud Data
To allow for gradual adoption of the solution, BMC AMI Cloud Data was designed to run side-by-side with the existing legacy data management products. For example, some mainframe organizations choose to migrate archives for certain applications only, and later add additional applications.
From analyzing our customers’ tape management catalog, we see that about 65 percent of their tape data naturally expires within 3-6 months. So, all this expiring tape data does not have to be migrated to the cloud. Rather, it’s recommended to let it expire on its own.
For data with a longer-term retention policy, BMC AMI Cloud Data provides a migration tool that automatically restores data from tape and writes it to the cloud, while keeping all its attributes and existing retention policy. Detailed reports are provided to estimate the migration process and to monitor it to completion.
Customer Success: BMC AMI Cloud Data Storage Cost Savings
The following storage sizing is based on a real business case from a medium European bank (12,000 MIPS).
The customer has 1.2 PB of storage in a Virtual Tape Server (VTS), backed by an ATL holding physical tapes. They purchased this VTS and ATL for $600 per TB, or $720,000 for three years, including maintenance fees.
Although the customer bought a 1.2 PB VTS, they are only using 850 TB today. Together with the customer, we analyzed their tape usage and found that 47 percent of their tape data is used for long-term archiving. Based on this analysis, the costs of 47 percent of 850 TBs in VTS and ATL is 399.5 TB * $600/TB = $239,700.
Amazon Glacier Deep Archive is well-suited for such a use case. With Amazon Glacier Deep Archive priced at $1.01 per TB per month, the cost for 399.5 TB of storage is only $403.5 per month, or $4,842 annually, or $14,526 to compare with a three-year contract for on-premises mainframe VTS and ATL storage.
With BMC AMI Cloud Data and Amazon Glacier Deep Archive, there is over 90 percent cost savings on the long-term archive storage by completely skipping the VTS tier, the automated tape library and the physical tapes.
BMC AMI Cloud Data Differentiators and Benefits
BMC AMI Cloud Data possesses unique characteristics that benefit customers:
- Software-only solution.
- Hardware agnostic, supporting any DASD storage (IBM, EMC, HDS, and others).
- Creates secured backup copies, directly to AWS Cloud storage.
- Recovers and restores data directly from AWS.
- Typically cuts backup and archive software costs by 50 percent or more by reducing MSU consumption, consolidating software licenses, and using cost-efficient AWS Cloud storage.
- Eliminates costly virtual tape hardware (VTS, VTL, etc.).
- Improves Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) by creating more and cheaper recovery points, without having to expand existing DASD or VTL capacity.
- Simplifies daily storage management operations and maintenance with no additional database or control data set to maintain in z/OS. All metadata required for restore and recall is stored with the data on the AWS Cloud.
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BMC Software – APN Partner Spotlight
BMC is an AWS Specialization Partner that helps enterprises benefit from cloud economics while accelerating digital transformation and adoption of hybrid cloud architectures.