>Just curious if tapes are in general going away. I don't think so, but real tape drives connected "directly" may be. Backups can go to virtual tape subsystems which have real (large) tape drives on the back end but the host doesn't directly address those back-end drives. Tape is still cheaper than disk for such purposes and having a VTS backed by a large pool of physical tapes I think still makes a lot of sense.
But for data interchange, manually handling physical cartridges probably doesn't make a lot of sense today. It may take some effort to get xGBs of disk space set aside to take the place of handling tapes, but that too is getting cheaper and easier every day. Those of us that were hanging on to old ESCON-connected drives because they were cheap to just have sitting on the floor may very well find that it's not worth the expense to put in FICON to ESCON convertors to carry those drives forward. My guess is that that will put the nail in the coffin for a lot of stand-alone drives out there. Scott Chapman ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
