Compression-enabled tape archiving

We have had a very messy last week or so at our AIX-Informix shop: our month-old not-so-highly-available EMC Symmetrix RAID box had a messy single-point of-failure outage....which sprinkled garbage all through its mngmnt system...the hardware was fixed in an hour, but the Informix (V5 running o AIX 3250) DB has been burping ever since. ANYWAY, We use 8mm tape drives for our archives and logging....these are the standard IBM or Exabyte 5 (uncompressed)-10 (standard, nonexotic, done-in the-Exabyte-hardware compressed) or 7-14GB drives. Informix is telling us that they only support uncompressed archiving. This to me is insane. since compressing the data stream before archinving it makes the archive run twice as fast....4-5 hours instead of 8-10.....The deity above only knows how a restore would take uncompressed, but my guesstimate is 12-16 hours....and, given the near 100% upti;me demaded by today's business climate, a restore that takes that long is about as useful as a lead life-preserver. Has anyone done restores from compressed 8mm tapes? Comments, suggestions??