Re: Virtual Tape - spanning volumes

The “cloud” is nothing more than someone else’s muti-tenant system (IBM or ACS, or whatever), or platform as a service, that you cannot fully control. I agree with your sentiments about not having sufficient control in the cloud, and our service as well as some others address that issue directly. For instance we offer both VTL and physical tape.

Enjoy the balance of the weekend.

Jim Oberholtzer
Agile Technology Architects

On Aug 29, 2021, at 5:47 AM, Patrik Schindler <poc@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello Jim,

Am 29.08.2021 um 02:29 schrieb Jim Oberholtzer <midrangel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Those vendors stopped making those devices, so naturally IBM could no longer sell them. Most of those were supported long after they stopped selling them, then IBM dropped support as the need declined.

Sounds logical.

The real question is how do you move a system into the cloud, when you don’t have a compatible VTL or tape that is supported on the cloud system.

I'm highly appalled to having my data "in the cloud" — sometimes it rains. ;-)

But seriously… I'm aware that "the cloud" is a thing for many years now and apparently, it stays for various reasons.

Or is "cloud" in an IBM i context more akin to a "hosted services" facility? (To me, the big difference is that in "the cloud" my data is somewhere, while with hosted services, I can be pointed by an employee in some DC to a certain machine or cluster being told, "that's where your data is". — Am I too picky here?)

Even the 3590 (and similars) line of tapes are dwindling fast. No one wants to deal with physical volumes, except as an air gap to foil extortionists.

In a DC environment, it's cumbersome to deal with physical volumes, that's true. My employer is still happy to use LTO5 in a library, for various reasons. Some customers demand regular backups of their service contracted machinery in their hands. Some customers need to fulfill laws and need to archive data for 10 years after last usage. Etc. Also we believe that tape cartridges are more robust to (accidentally) adverse handling than dealing with physical disks.

:wq! PoC

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