IBM 3590 costs and cartridge replacements (retired system?) VSSI VTAPE disk costs and lack of easy D/R.
IBM VTL system Virtualized Tape systems EMC DISK LIBRARY Replacement for Carts D/R questions. Other possible solutions. Flex-CUB (if you can get a 3490-F10, you could keep existing carts or use it to copy incoming volumes to disk volumes for easier use) BusTech box (see above) Both the above would allow trivial mirroring to other sites, and the BusTech box provides multisystem attach and FICON, I think. Both use less expensive open-systems disk than VTAPE (although you could use FCP disk with VTAPE, I suppose). At some point you will need a 3590, as IBM is likely to stop supporting 3490 distribution tapes soon (3480 is already gone, I think).
