a "better" solution would be to have your virtual tape controller drive (where your virtual tapes are kept) copied to another DASD (preferably a raid based system). Trying to re-introduce physical tape into your site would be undoing many years of purposeful movement away from the many, many MANY issues that real tapes are subject to.
You can likely sync your virtual tape system storage with almost any network attached storage. Then if you have a problem with your VTS solution, you can just read the tape datasets directly from that network attached system and either restore them onto the VTS or read the (probably AWS format) tapes with a program directly from the network storage. The problem with the "real" tape controllers and tapes is that you would end up adding them to your mainframe as real devices so that you could read the tapes "just in case" your VTS broke. It would be infinitely cheaper to buy a second VTS and keep it in sync with your primary VTS. I can't imaging the clusterf**k that would occur with trying to go backwards and introduce the problems of real tapes into a modern data center. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
