Media Worry (was: Final thread: Gold nugget)

From Al Macintyre

This reminds me ... about 5-7 years ago when we were on S/36 moving to AS/36, 
I told management that it would be a real good idea if the process could 
somehow wean me off diskettes because:
We had over 4,000 8" diskettes of stuff off-line in storage & in the last 2 
years alone we had doubled our supply & the cost of these, even buying them 
second hand from other companies weaning themselves off diskettes, was 
seriously escalating;
Off site backup in magazines in carry cases was approaching file cabinet size 
& last winter when one of us slipped on ice & fell into snow drift, 50 
diskettes were ruined ... they are extremely fragile;
Running a decent backup takes hours of juggling magazines & we really need to 
buy some more because ... & I demonstrated what's involved in replacing 
diskettes in them because not enough ... the time I doing this I could be 
programming new improvements for end users;
The cost of diskette support on total box & the number of times the diskette 
drive has gone down for serious time compared to service calls on our 
printers & other things.

Management enthusiastically went along with this deal ... the clincher was 
that our hardware support people said that they had copies of earlier IBM 
boxes in storage, so that if we needed to load stuff off of 5 year old 
diskettes, we could copy that to tape, for a fee, at their facility.

I was highly annoyed that the life time retention of tape media did not seem 
to measure up to that of diskettes, but no longer so hurting for DASD that I 
had to store source code not currently being modified off line, so less 
thrashing of stuff on & off.

A few years later we went to dual tape drives, adding 8 mm (7 gig) to join 
QIC (2 gig) originally on the box ... our M36 could ONLY access the QIC, 
while OS/400 could access either.  We occasionally had visiting AS/400 
neighbors copying stuff between the 2 mediums on our box.

Almost everything was on 8 mm when we switched to model 170 a year ago, and 
same scenario ... I do not know the real choices, but hardware sales & 
management ended up with a box that used MLRI (11 gig) which could read QIC 
(with high rate of failure) but all those 8 mm tapes were now in the same 
boat as the 8 inch diskettes ... if we need an on-line copy of something that 
got moved off-line, we can work out a deal with our hardware supplier.

My point is that as archives develop on a particular media, and conversion 
policies generally focus on the here & now reality on-line, there is growing 
historical media that will not load directly to current box & will it be 
clearly understood by next MIS staff that the data has value & there are 
choices for getting at it if we really need it & understand the software 
issues since some of it is for packages whose licenses we have let expire.

I guess I just talked myself into reviewing our documentation on this whole 
topic.

> At my last job we were a company with worldwide operations. 
> the GL folks would run trials for all of these companies that generated 
> THOUSANDS of spool files that were THOUSANDS of pages long. 
> I investigated several spool file save utilities and the one I picked 
> paid for itself in less than 2 months. What had been happening 
> was that the Financial folks insisted that they needed all of this stuff 
saved 
> in case they were audited but they didn't want to print it out. I could see 
> that because it took PHYSICAL room, but at the same time 
> it was taking up DISK room.
>  At the time we had well over a years worth of this stuff, one Year/Month 
> outq for each month. I started offloading this stuff to tape and knocked 
> over 25% off of our storage and this was on a fairly large system for then
> (5 or 6 years ago). It kept us from having to add disk !

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor of BPCS 405 CD Rel-02 running on 
AS/400 V4R3 http://www.cen-elec.com Central Industries of Indiana--->Quality 
manufacturer of wire harnesses and electrical sub-assemblies
+---
| This is the Midrange System Mailing List!
| To submit a new message, send your mail to MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com.
| To subscribe to this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-SUB@midrange.com.
| To unsubscribe from this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-UNSUB@midrange.com.
| Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com
+---