Speaking from the local government side here, you are speaking to the choir on costs.
I was under the impression that z/VM 5.2 now allowed native use of SCSI DASD, which I assummed also ment SCSI TAPE. I would think that eventually it will come. Long after you went to a different solution. In my case, I'm in the process of cost justifying an IBM VTS/3494 setup. That is virtual enough for our requirements (high capacity, fast transfer and no Operations). I've been wanting virtual tape for over 5 years now. That is a decent virtual tape (the MP3000 emulated tape just wasn't so good for writing). And VSE Virtual tape over the network (10 mbs network speeds), didn't pan out either (didn't help that Dynam didn't really support them well). But we have a Linux project that has the added justification of a tape upgrade. Just can't backup 4 TB with our bus and tag IBM 3490A/B drives. It will be interesting to see just how much cost we can eliminate (to pay for the VTS), and whether new hardware can be cost competitive with used hardware. But back on the origional topic, I would gather that larger shops already have solved their tape problems with a robotic setup (perhaps with VTS). The small shops (P/390 and Flex/ES shops), already have their solutions. It is the mid size shops that may be able to influnance the use of the resources to have emulated tape on disk. Tom Duerbusch THD Consulting >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 5/30/2006 2:42:08 AM >>> > My understanding is that you can attach SCSI based tape drives to the > mainframe. All you need is FCP adapters ($25k list price), and a > processor > that supports them (all current mainframes, from IBM) and current z/VM > and/or > zLinux systems (don't know about MVS and it may be a z/VSE 4 type thing). You can physically connect them, but only for use with Linux. DDR or SPXTAPE can't use them. Guest OSes without explicit SCSI programming support can't use them. > If that can be used, eventually, to solve your need, I doubt IBM would > spend a > lot of resources to emulate tapes under VM. > > We are looking at an IBM VTS to solve our virtual tape needs (i.e. no > Operator > intervention). Doesn't help if you already own the SCSI drives and are power, budget or space constrained, or just want more capacity on tape than existing IBM solutions can provide.
