Exactly! There is more than one use case here.
Tape as a backup medium is certainly not dead. It's the cheapest (or
among the cheapest) of alternatives for long-term offline storage. And
for verifiable archives, WORM tape is a great solution.
As an *interchange* media, it's problematic unless all data exchange
partners have compatible drives.
As a *software delivery* media, it appears to be dying from the numbers
I see for our own software delivery. It would be interesting to know
what the other vendors are seeing, but I would expect them to be seeing
a similar trend.
Clark Morris wrote:
Given that IBM has reported a way to create multi-terabyte tapes (and
presumably read them), I find it hard to believe tape is dead. Whether
there will be enough drives of a given type commonly available at the
dwindling number of mainframe sites to make it worth while for IBM to
have that tape drive to create the tapes is another question. 3420s
and then 3480s were at one time ubiquitous. Now I suspect the variety
of incompatible drives is making make it increasing interesting for
any vendor to supply their software on tape.
--
John Eells
IBM Poughkeepsie
[email protected]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
