Radoslaw wrote: <quote> My english is to poor to be tendentious, make allusions, etc. In Polish I also prefer straightforward speaking.
Regarding to the question: 3490E are so small-capacity, so it is simply too slow and to small for nowadays requirement. Yes, I know there are small shops somewhere - OK, I know MS-DOS installations with 386 CPU and 4MB of RAM. I know people still using diskettes. I have 5.25 diskettes in use. In 3174. But I am pretty aware it is really obsolete. I bought in in second hand, never had any support contract. My support is spare box (more than 1) and I know it's NOT mission-critical. I also have 3490E for software installations. Almost all of vendors *except IBM* can offer some alternative to IBM tapes. Unfortunately, here in Poland Shopz does not offer products as well. Even IBM started using DVDs and other media. However even if you keep 3490E just for installation tapes, it's *not* mission-critical (installation can wait a day or even week). So, this is my definition of serious customer or rather serious usage. I would like to remain my previous sentences: it is possible to use the drives without support, it is possible to buy another one from second hand and could be much cheaper than maintenance contract. So - why worry about eos ? I would also mention quality of IBM service. I don't know worse. And more expensive. </quote> I'm one of those small shops. We have a mix of 3490s and 3590s. I use the 3590s for my nightly backups, but we use the 3490s on a daily basis, all day long, for mission-critical work. We have a database application that generates log files to disk. We purposefully keep these disk logs small so the database flips logs every 30-45 minutes throughout the day. At each journal flip, the just-closed log gets written to a 3490 tape. Way too small an amount of data to be taking up large quantities of 3590s. And, before somebody tells me to just append the logs to a larger capacity tape, I can't. We have a purchased package that requires each of the log files to be in a separate dataset for nightly processing. If IBM ever drops support on the 3490s I'm running, I will be forced to go to the 3590s. Not only am I a small shop, but I'm in a small(er) community and my third-party support is limited (actually non-existent). Rex ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
