I disagree, physical tape generation is not efficient (cost-wise or in reality man-power wise).
You can Rsync most VTS boxes, and most also have built in DR recovery options to allow offloading copies of the data. There are fairly inexpensive VTS's (like a z/VT from Optica) which allows you to write directly to network storage, (no internal drives are necessary). There are several vendors that have VTS with direct network attachment capabilities, for both primary and backup syncing. The solution is not to be carting tapes back and forth, (especially in a war zone). That's just asking for trouble. You can send it electronically much quicker and very securely, to almost anywhere in the world that you think is safe to store that data. The solution is to be able to have a copy of your data, that copy going to physical tape is too time consuming to create and too time consuming to maintain. You will end up (like most sites used to have) with people designated to keep track of the tapes, to make sure that they go out and come back on time, to make sure they get created correctly and from the correct source.... it's a waste when you have options to do that type of thing in far better and easier ways. You can even use something like IBM Cloud connection to have your data go to virtual tape and the cloud at the same time (or extremely soon after creation). There are many similar products, and none of them would require the costs and headaches associated with physical tapes. Remember that tapes degrade fairly quickly, and exposing tapes to environmental changes make that degradation happen faster. Also, you have to think about redundancy of the control units and drive transports. If you only have one, and it breaks, so long backups. If you have two and they both break you will have just as many problems, but repair and maintenance costs for those drive and control units will go up over time. They don't get cheaper over time at all, maintenance costs always go up as things age, especially things with moving parts. Brian ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
