I think the challenge you will face, whatever route you choose, the word support will apply. Pretty much all physical 3n90 type drives are EOL or EOSL & even with the FUJITSU Storage ETERNUS CS8000 VTL, what tape drives & libraries you can attach might be encompassed by the aforementioned EOL or EOSL challenges.
~30 years ago I used to state "does tape have to be 1/2" wide & i/m mile long", referring to the 3590 at the time. Physical tape for sure has a place in the storage hierarchy, but the options for the IBM Mainframe are very limited. Thinking out of the box, all Mainframe VTLs use a format called AWSTAPE for writing the tape volumes to a non-Mainframe filesystem. Typically this very old file format has been modified to support things like compression & encryption. Whatever, a standard NAS or FC filesystem is used to store the Mainframe tape volumes. You could use your incumbent Distributed Systems backup software & physical tape infrastructure to secure this filesystem. If it was to be used as an immutable backup or similar, as a last chance recovery for a Mainframe system, there should b a "Level 0 Rebuild" facility, within the VTL offering, to build the "Control System" of the VTL (E.g. VOLSER, VTL Metadata), allowing you to restore the filesystem & the Mainframe system to a point where you could start using Mainframe tape as per normal, with a minimal "Driver" z/OS system. If you wanted "Data Interchange" heaven forbid, there might be an Export/Import function for individual volumes, but once again, if not, as the back-end filesystem would be keyed by VOLSER, you could write some simple code to copy the individual file. We're going back to ~1980's-1990's thinking, but that might be a way forward... There's not many "independent" Enterprise Class options left for IBM Mainframe VTL, but Optica zVT is a very usable price competitive solution. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
