On Thu, 31 Aug 2006 22:23:19 -0500, Russell Witt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> .... For those that >never went to virtual-devices, it's a good way to encrypt data. But since >IBM, STK, EMC and CA have all been pushing the advantages of virtual-tape >(and there are so many advantages, its hard not to use it), this offering >leaves a lot to be desired. > IMHO, the only advantage of virtual tape is that it allows ancient applications to continue to write to tape long after the economics of it make sense. Several years ago, at a previous shop, IBM tried hard to sell us VTS, but we took a hard look at our tape usage. We found that there were a lot of applications that had been designed long ago when disk space was much more expensive that were writing their "huge" data sets to tape. How huge? Well, there was a time when "huge" meant anything more than 100 cylinders on a 2314. We had "huge" tape data sets on tape that were smaller than some of our small data sets! Aside from that, we had D/R issues. We didn't want to have to replicate all of our tapes for D/R. We were already keeping off-site copies of all our backups, both full-volume and incremental, as well as our archive tapes. We made the decision that we would use tape only for backups, achives and a very small number of really big data sets, like SMF dumps. We were an FDR shop and FDR/ABR fills up tapes quite nicely. Applications that still needed tapes had to justify the need and manage their own off-site copies. In the end, we converted everything to disk. VTS? An interesting idea, but not, in my opinion, a good way to go. YMMV Tom Marchant ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
