Storage solutions

As your company produces a greater volume of information, and as the value of that information grows, the methods you use to protect and preserve it become vital corporate strategies. Storage has gone from being a feature of a server to being an entity unto itself.

It performs several valuable functions within your enterprise, including the following:

• Availability. Your storage solution must enable you to access your data when you need it, without exception. In some settings, such as a hospital, access to data can mean the difference between life and death.
• Integrity. Your data must be in exactly the same condition when it returns to you as it was when it was stored. That means it must be safe from corruption, loss, and outside attack.
• Recoverability. Your storage solution should ensure that you can recover your data in the event of a natural disaster, such as a fire, flood, or tornado.

The purpose of this topic is to step you through the world of iSeries™ storage and help you make choices about which storage technologies are right for your company now, and which may be useful in the future.

• What's new for V5R4
  For V5R4, the Tape and Optical storage topics have been expanded to include:
• Printable PDF
  Use this to view and print a PDF of this information.
• How the iSeries views storage
  This topic describes how objects are stored on your iSeries server and lays the groundwork for the other topics in this section.
• Disk
  This topic describes how disk storage on the iSeries works and describes how it can be configured and used for different storage purposes.
• Tape
  This topic describes the advantages and limitations of using tape for storage. It makes some recommendations about when tape is a good choice and when you should consider other media. It also provides planning, setup, management, and troubleshooting information for stand-alone tape devices and tape libraries.
• Optical storage
  This topic provides an overview and reference guide for IBM optical support on the iSeries server with the i5/OS™ operating system.
• Virtual storage
  Virtual storage consists of objects that, when used together, imitate tape, CD, DVD, and write-once read-many (WORM) media on your disk units. The imitated media appear to the server to be actual media.