Re: CD-R & DVD-R for the iSeries and Office Vision, 2 seperate questions

> Hello everyone,
>
> I've have a couple of queries to follow up on and thought I
might get better
> feed back from this group than I have been recieving from IB....
>
> Does anyone know if there are plans to introduce a directly
attached CD
> writer and/or DVD writer for the as/400, if so will there be
OS/400 or
> hardware minimum requirements, i.e. V5R1 on the new 2/8xx series
?

We have a direct attach CD writer for the AS/400, we have had it
for five years, and It creates CDs you can load on your AS/400.

We could do a DVD writer too, I suppose. The problem with DVDs are
they are a very slow writer - 1.3 MB a second.  The second problem
is that the DVD writers I have seen have all ben cartidge DVDs,
and you can't read one in a DVD reader (except a cartidge reader).
And even then there are different 'standards'.

Pardon my cluelessness, but is IBM shipiing DVD readers on new
AS/400s?

And has anyone see a DVD writer that writes to 'naked' DVDs that
can be read in a DVD-ROM reader?

Basically we can write AS/400 tape data to any peripheral that can
attach to a PC, and with a little more work (that we plan to do)
we could go the other way also. In other words, SAVLIB to our
device, we take your SAVLIB, maybe zip it, and write it to
DVD-RAM, CD-R, anything else you want.

Then we read from the device and present it back to the SCSI
interface as a tape file.

One simple thing you might do is SAVLIB to a version of our
device, then write your normal AS/400 tapes on a tape drive
attached to our device. Why would you want to do this?

Faster backups. Write to our device, you would be writing to RAM
most of the time (put a couple of gigabytes of ram on the thing),
and hard drives do burst mode up to 100MB a second. No tape
positioning time.

Duplicate backups. You backup to our hard drive, we write
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 copies of your tape. How many save while active
backup users are writing a second copy of their tape(s) like they
should?

Permanent backups. Compress your databases with zip type
compression, and you may gain compression up to 10X or more (the
best we have seen was 16 times - 94% - but I think it was a backup
of db saves of spool files.) Our worst compressing so far was 60%,
which is 2.5 times - or 1`.6 GB on a 25 cent CD. Make two or three
permanent copies. It hink this will end up being a popular way to
save data, because it is small, fast, copies are fast and cheap. I
just bought a 24X CD writer for $139. It wasn't on sale.

Restore is lightning fast. No wait for tape search.

It would be trivial for IBM to support mutlivolume tape format
files on a CD, with header and trailer (EOV for continued volumes)
on their existing CD reader. And since they have zip-decompression
software on the AS/400, and decompression is relatively
lightweight load on the CPU, they could do that also. All of
sudden that CD-R would be a very useful peripheral.

They way I see it working is this: You savlib/savobj to my device
as one humongous tapefile. I split it,  put into CD-sized chunks
with EOV labels (I would make them up based on the EOF labels on
the tape image) and write a series of CDs, including zipping the
data file if IBM decides to support that.

Or just use the compression and restore them from the disk copy if
you use them in the next few days, or back thru the CD drive(s) on
the PC, filtered through my software. Or write a compressed CD
with the option to copy/convert it to AS/400 native format.

I could put a robot CD writer in my backup server, if it was
considered necessary. Write 10 CDs a night = 6.5 GB uncompressed,
and somewhere between 16 GB and 100 GB  depending on the
compression. It costs $2.50 cents, and you can make a second copy
in an hour. You would save far more than that in operator time.
Would a $20 million dollar company pay $5 a night to gain two
permanent digital copies of its essential business records? What
about a $200 million dollar company?

>From what I am reading in the specs, plus the guidance of one of
the IBM authors of the white paper, if you guys are willing to use
LODRUN to restore, I can save libraries of any length to CD. I
sincerely did not consider that as an option until I heard the
response here.

Thanks!

I wonder if I could modify the OPTINST to unzip files as it
restore them?


Brad Jensen