Book excerpt: This IBM® Redbooks® publication gives a broad understanding of storage clouds and the initial functions that were introduced for mainframe data to be transferred to cloud storage . IBM Data Facility Storage Management Subsystem (DFSMS) and the IBM DS8000® added functions to provide elements of serverless data movement, and for IBM z/OS® to communicate with a storage cloud. The function is known as Transparent Cloud Tiering (TCT) and is composed of the following key elements: A gateway in the DS8000, which allows the movement of data to and from Object Storage by using a network connection. DFSMShsm enhancements to support Migrate and Recall functions to and from the Object Storage. Other commands were enhanced to monitor and report on the new functions. DFSMShsm uses the Web Enablement toolkit for z/OS to create and access the metadata for specific clouds, containers, and objects. DFSMSdss enhancements to provide some basic backup and restore functions to and from the cloud. The IBM TS7700 can also be set up to act as though it is cloud storage from the DS8000 perspective. This IBM Redbooks publication is divided into the following parts: Part 1 provides you with an introduction to clouds. It provides basic knowledge and terminology. Part 2 shows you how we set up the TCT in a controlled laboratory and how the new functions work. We provide points to consider to help you set up your storage cloud, including network connectivity, and integrate it into your operational environment. Part 3 shows you how we used the new functions to communicate with the cloud and to send data to it and retrieve data from it.. This edition applies to DS8900F Release 9.3 and covers more recent features of TCT such as multi-cloud connections, along with extra advice for high availability cloud connectivity and DFSMShsm improvements.