I quoted below a part of an email, and changed the subject.
Barbara - are you saying that very few have tape drives anymore, or just
people with ADCD systems? I know most of the systems I work with have tape
drives, but not all.
There is one database I load for a customer every other month. It's a
database of all the name and addresses of everyone in the US that companies
use for their advertising I assume. The company that makes it said in the
middle of last year that they weren't going to send tapes anymore. The
database is 2 3590 tapes, so it is pretty large. I tried several times
downloading the database to my laptop and FTPing it to the client. I could
never get it to work! After opening a problem with the vendor of the
database, and much discussion, they said that for mainframes they would
still send tapes. What a relief. I NEVER have problems loading tapes.
I can see tapes not being used for a small account, but I can't imagine them
not being used for larger accounts. I have to believe its cheaper to back
up to tape than to DASD, and also a lot safer. If the dasd is in the same
room, if a disaster occurs, its gone too. If its elsewhere, you need really
high speed lines, plus updates are a lot slower. Tapes can be cheaply
shipped off site and stored in a hopefully secure vault.
Just curious if tapes are in general going away.
Eric Bielefeld
Sr. Systems Programmer
----- Original Message -----
From: "ibmmain" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: FTP "ERRORS" [was: RACF on an ADCD system]
Our ADCD system certainly does not have tape drives (does anyones'?), so all
ftp went DASD to DASD, with the receiving dataset preallocated. I realize
that having no tape drives doesn't mean the support wouldn't be in 1.13.
Barbara
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