It’s just past Y2k, and this big company is in the process of moving its data center to share space with an affiliate company, reports a mainframe pilot fish on the scene.

“The majority of the batch work at night was processing sequential files,” fish says. “We found that the best solution in terms of cost was an automated tape library. The data transfer from tape was the same data rate as from disk, so the only overhead was an automated tape mount that took 20 seconds.

“The tape library was large enough to hold all our data for 35 days, so we could process our daily, weekly and monthly jobs with almost no actual human intervention, and it was considerably less expensive than disk space.”

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