IBM® Z has a close and unique relationship to its storage. Over the years, improvements to the Z processors and storage software, the disk storage systems, and their communication architecture consistently reinforced this synergy. This IBM Redpaper publication summarizes and highlights the various aspects, advanced functions, and technologies that are often pioneered by IBM, and that make the IBM Z® and the IBM DS8000 products an ideal combination. This paper is intended for users who have some familiarity with IBM Z and the IBM DS8000® series and want a condensed but comprehensive overview of the synergy items up to the IBM z15™ server with z/OS v2.5 and the IBM DS8900 Release 9.2 firmware.

Ever-increasing storage demands have a negative effect on an organization's IT budget and complicate the overall storage infrastructure and management. Companies are looking at ways to use their storage resources more efficiently. Thin provisioning can help by reducing the amount of unused storage that is typically allocated to applications or users. Now available for the IBM® DS8880 for Fixed Block (FB) and Count Key Data (CKD) volumes, thin provisioning defers the allocation of actual space on the storage system until the time that the data must effectively be written to disk. This IBM Redpaper™ publication provides an overall understanding of how thin provisioning works on the IBM DS8880. It also provides insights into the functional design and its implementation on the DS8880 and includes illustrations for the configuration of thin-provisioned volumes from the DS GUI or the DS CLI. This edition applies to DS8880 Release 8.5 or later.

This IBM® Redbooks® publication describes the concepts, architecture, and implementation of the IBM DS8880 family. The book provides reference information to assist readers who need to plan for, install, and configure the DS8880 systems. The IBM DS8000® family is a high-performance, high-capacity, highly secure, and resilient series of disk storage systems. The DS8880 family is the latest and most advanced of the DS8000 offerings to date. The high availability, multiplatform support, including IBM z Systems®, and simplified management tools help provide a cost-effective path to an on-demand world. The IBM DS8880 family now offers business-critical, all-flash, and hybrid data systems that span a wide range of price points: DS8884 -- Business Class DS8886 -- Enterprise Class DS8888 -- Analytics Class The DS8884 and DS8886 are available as either hybrid models, or can be configured as all-flash. Each model represents the most recent in this series of high-performance, high-capacity, flexible, and resilient storage systems. These systems are intended to address the needs of the most demanding clients. Two powerful IBM POWER8® processor-based servers manage the cache to streamline disk I/O, maximizing performance and throughput. These capabilities are further enhanced with the availability of the second generation of high-performance flash enclosures (HPFEs Gen-2). Like its predecessors, the DS8880 supports advanced disaster recovery (DR) solutions, business continuity solutions, and thin provisioning. All disk drives in the DS8880 storage system include the Full Disk Encryption (FDE) feature. The DS8880 can automatically optimize the use of each storage tier, particularly flash drives and flash cards, through the IBM Easy Tier® feature. The DS8880 also includes the Copy Services Manager code and allows for easier integration in a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) infrastructure.