The grid communication feature is designed to help keep data available, even if one of the remote sites experiences an outage; up to eight TS7780 systems can be configured to participate in a grid environment. This function helps maintain availability during planned maintenance, service or system upgrades, or unexpected outages and helps avoid the physical transportation of tape cartridges in the event of a disaster.

In addition to the traditional HDD cache solution, the all flash version with SSD based cache drawers has been re-designed to support up to 2.66 PBs of native capacity while delivering improved performance over the HDD based solution. This will help reduce batch processing times, and also improve TCO and management overhead for latency sensitive IBM Z workloads.

The TS7780 offers smaller footprint, lower entry cost option. Flexible deployments for organizations of all sizes with different needs. The powerful capabilities of TS7780 virtual tape are delivered as pre-packaged racked solutions or client-supplied *19” industry standard rack configurations. (* 19" inch customer rack options will be available in 2nd half 2025),

Simplify and accelerate data movement while providing savings in IBM Z CPU utilization with DS8000 Object Store. The DS8000 uses Transparent Cloud Tiering (TCT) to move DFSMShsm object data to the TS7780, sharing both FICON logical volume data and DS8900F object data on the same TS7780 cluster.

Leveraging Transparent Cloud Tiering (TCT) for storage of virtual tape data in public or private clouds. The server-less direct data transfer from TS7780 to a cloud may improve business efficiency while reducing capital and operating expense. When data is stored in the cloud by a cluster, all clusters in the grid which are cloud-attached enabled have access to that object store instance.

Increase capacity in 20 TB and 100 TB increments concurrently on the new TS7780 cache subsystem now delivering optional SSD based all flash cache with up to 2.6PBs of native capacity with ultra-low latency.

TS7780 now receives encrypted data from the host, supported by FICON technology protects it in-flight across the network over Ethernet. And finally, helps secure sensitive at-rest data with support for both disk and tape drive-based encryption. In addition the new TS7780 uses 32GB FICON and will soon support (2nd half 2025) FICON end point encryption.

Choose between multiple compression engines in order to match a variety of factors such as use case, block size, and performance requirements to the unique traits of each compression algorithm. Options are the standard compression built into the FICON adapters used by TS7780, LZ4 compression and ZSTD compression algorithms. Finally, IBM DS8000 has added the capability to compress data prior to transfer across TCP/IP connections to TS7780/70/60 systems configured as Object Storage targets expecting CAPEX by 55% and OPEX over 3-year period by 44%.

IBM Expert Care is designed to reduce the cost and duration of downtime in the data center while providing your organization with more predictable and consistent yearly maintenance costs.