Actnet announces significant enhancements to Mainframe Appliance for Storage

"For years Actnet has offered its customers a proven cost-effective way to seamlessly access applications and data that resides on mainframe systems," said Gavin Dunlop, CEO, Actnet. "This new version of the Bus-Tech MAS provides an even more attractive solution to our customers looking to optimise performance, reliability and manageability of their mainframe environment."

Bus-Tech, Inc, a leading supplier of data centre connectivity products, announced significant enhancements to its leading tape-on-disk controller with the release of Mainframe Appliance for Storage (MAS) 2.0. This release of the MAS offers a new up-to-date operating system and re-engineered tape-on-disc application software offering enhanced reliability and significantly increased performance.

The MAS 2.0 provides enhanced mainframe connectivity by offering emulation of up to 256 tape drives and dynamic path recognition. The increased drive support allows for simplified scheduling of MAS resources used by large-scale mainframes as each controller is configured with more drives. The dynamic path recognition enhancements in MAS 2.0, enable the product to learn the FICON or ESCON channel paths to the mainframe(s) it is attached to which simplifies initial product configuration and reduces the total number of MAS controllers needed in complex environments.

Bus-Tech provides MAS-Fx (FICON-based) and MAS-Ex (ESCON-based) that work with EMC Centera content addressed storage (CAS) and EMC Celerra network-attached storage (NAS). These recently released models deliver performance improvements of 35% or more compared with previous MAS models. Higher performance means greater value for customers looking to perform backups, store fixed content tape data, or replace aging 3995 optical media storage using MAS with EMC Centera or EMC Celerra.

With 16 active tape drives, the new, faster MAS-Fx was recently tested with EMC Centera. These MAS-Fx enhancements reported an increased performance of over 35% when compared with the previous generation MAS product.

"By allowing drives to be dynamically re-allocated across multiple logical partitions and mainframes as needed, the MAS can more easily be configured in a complex environment," said Dunlop.

"Companies now have access to applications and data, which reside on the mainframe at a reduced cost and significantly enhanced speed regardless of mainframe configurations, access method requirements and application specifics. The MAS is a solution to be considered by anyone looking to improve their backup and disaster recovery capabilities."