Rick wrote: "Another datapoint indicating that MVS should learn FBA. But it's a losing battle. There seems to be some unwritten law that says "disk" on "channel" must be [E]CKD, so that while VM, VSE, Linux, and others are happily embracing fixed block disk, the mainframe channel-attached "disk" MARKET stays constrained."
Actually, it is a well know economic law. If people don't buy it, why support it? When os/370 came out, it introduced a fixed block file system (VSAM) now standardized at 4K blocks, eerily similar to the block size of a page in memory and the page size on disk. Also introduced were fixed block devices that would handle both VSAM and paging nicely. Few people bought them because most of their data were in odd size blocks, mostly multiples of 80 and they didn't want to have a mix of devices - some for VSAM and paging and some for the rest of their data. And to this day, a good portion of the data of the people who buy zSeries day are bound by the 80 byte record and variable sized blocks. Its pretty much the same reason people buy 2x4's (boards). That's a standard and its been around a very long time, so housing and building construction is based on a standard wood 2x4, even if the material is steel! A hollow steel 2x4 is stronger than a solid wood 2x4, but the measurement is still a 2x4! ===== Jim Sibley RHCT, Implementor of Linux on zSeries "Computer are useless.They can only give answers." Pablo Picasso __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
