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> 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
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