Hello, I am not sure that he implied that but the FBA idea was FORCEd from VSE because MVS/OS could not handle it. Removing FBA would make VSE more z/OS like. 3310, 3370, 9336 are all FBA.
FBA eliminated the conversion problem, and IMHO was faster access. Migration to larger devices was just done. I believe the S36, S38, and the AS400 all use FBA. z/VM virtual Disk is VFB-512. Why not FBA? Oh, seems to me that some of the older high strength CPU's used FBA devices to hold the microcode. Ed Martin Aultman Health Foundation 330-588-4723 ext 40441 -----Original Message----- From: The IBM z/VM Operating System [mailto:ib...@listserv.uark.edu] On Behalf Of David L. Craig Sent: Monday, March 09, 2009 10:42 AM To: IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU Subject: Re: Must be Friday: Mainframe USBs! On Sun, Mar 08, 2009 at 02:10:24PM -0400, Richard Troth wrote: > > ECKD (today) is an IBM hardware solution for a software problem. > Originally, CKD exposed not only counts and keys (thus the acronym) > but more significantly tracks and records. NO ONE but MVS (and TPF) > has a firm requirement for that. What I mean is that CP and VSE can > at least tolerate a lack of tracks and records. (They can run from > IPL to shutdown on things like SAN.) More significantly, CMS, Linux, > and Solaris (or UTS or AIX or USS) explicitly THROW AWAY the track > and record semantics that our precious storage subsystems worked so > hard to present on the channel. They can't use it! They just care > about the data on the disk, not its geometry. Are you implying VSE VSAM KSDS files do not utilize CKD architecture and/or there is no net performance advantage to that in this day and age? Maybe I need to look at the effort to migrate to 3370... -- May the LORD God bless you exceedingly abundantly! Dave Craig - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - "'So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe.'" --from _Nightfall_ by Asimov/Silverberg
