> Has anyone heard of any IBM plans to provide non-ECKD DASD
> support for zOS?
> We can't go on emulating 33X0 volumes much longer.
What Harry said.
While I agree that MVS should grok FBA, but
the problem is not that we have and continue to have CKD.
The problem is that FBA is so poorly valued in S/390 circles.
There is the incorrect assumption that all S/390 DASD is CKD.
One of the inelegant results is where the S/390 side of some
storage subsystem continues to use CKD flavor while the SCSI side
gives access to that same content. IFF such dual-port access
is enabled, it should on the SCSI side retain all the key,
track & record blocking, count, and whatever other "non data"
content. OR, let the S/390 side of such a thing be FBA.
I confess that I have limited experience with multi-protocol DASD,
but at least one engineer has told me that the plan is to wrap
"distributed systems" content (just blocks) in CKD style records.
That bothers me. I'm hoping he's wrong.
The value of FBA is that it *only* supports data.
There is no "non data" to be lost in the translation one way
nor to be simulated in some cheezy glue microcode the other way.
I guess I'm just looking for consistency.
But we can't make others do "the right thing", can we?
