Re: Compression-enabled tape archiving

In article <53tf7p$nkf@news.mhv.net>, sdean@mhv.net writes >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?? The reason Informix do not support compress tape drives is to simplify support. Technology uncompressed drives has been around for a long time and so is reasonably stable. Compressed drive are a recent invention (I think they are anyway). How do you know the compression code on the tape drive works and has no bugs it is. After all it is software and hence liable to bugs... -- David Williams