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Brad, Sounds like you got a real WINNER here...! Seems like a MUST have, for many shops, for a very broad number of reasons (which can be summed up as: MUCH more EFFECTIVE backups). Let me know if you're giving away units to beta sites...! Is your gear covered by IBM maintenance? May be a hassle and/or expensive to get, but that always increased my comfort level with 3rd party products. Time to market is key, because as soon as you get even a whiff of success, IBM'll come out with a product, and there goes your margins... (Most shops, in my experience, will prefer to pay "x" dollars more to get an IBM product.) I don't understand the last question because I don't know what OPTINST is. If that's IBM code, IMHO, you would NOT want to modify it. Finally, back to the subject of multi-volume processing, if you're a member of PWD (I've lapsed), you can get more info on LIPI's here, under first heading, "General Resources": http://www.as400.ibm.com/developer/resource.html. jt | -----Original Message----- | From: midrange-l-admin@midrange.com | [mailto:midrange-l-admin@midrange.com]On Behalf Of Brad Jensen | Sent: Sunday, December 09, 2001 1:22 AM | To: midrange-l@midrange.com | Subject: 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 | | | | | | | | _______________________________________________ | This is the Midrange Systems Technical Discussion (MIDRANGE-L) | mailing list | To post a message email: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com | To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options, | visit: http://lists.midrange.com/cgi-bin/listinfo/midrange-l | or email: MIDRANGE-L-request@midrange.com | Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives | at http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l. |
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