HPE Storage Users Group

We have a z/os mainframe with a DMX2000 dedicated to it... the DMX is less than half full of disk, and the rest is 100% allocated to the mainframe, about 7 TB worth, of which the mainframe uses about half. Problem is, we're paying steep hardware maintenance on a fairly oversized solution thats getting "long in the tooth" and progressively more expensive to maintain. So we started looking for an ROI.

With an abundance of capacity on our 3PAR storage, one option we are looking into is using a diskless Hitachi USP VM to front end the fibre channel 3PAR luns and serve up ficon IBM emulated drives to the mainframe. I don't understand why the IBM's SVC wasn't designed to do that.

I have also read about solutions from Bustech and Lumenate that basically perform the emulation via a SUN server in the middle acting as the go between.

Has anyone else out there had any success (or failures) trying to hook their 3par up to mainframe?

... and now that HP owns 3PAR, we are considering using an HP EX instead of a HDS system for mainframe storage replacement.

As it stands today, the EX solution does not support virtualizing external 3rd party luns (3PAR) and presenting them as Mainframe devices. From what I understand that is not a technical issue, just a support matrix testing issue. Maybe HP will fix that!