> I have a customer with two 3490s sitting virtually unused.  They are =
> also contemplating getting a couple of 3590s.  They have SAP with an =
> Informix database running on an AIX 4.1 system on raw drives.  They are =
> telling me that Informix cannot cope with the auto-loaders, and ADSM, =
> which can cope with 3490s doesn't work with raw devices.  I thought =
> adsmpipe would do raw devices, but it can only do full offline backups =
> and is not fully supported.  Comments or suggestions?
>

I am not an ADSM person, but I do know Informix.  If you are not using
Informix's tbtape, or onbar utility, your backups aren't worth much.
True, you can shutdown the database and backup the raw devices.
However, If you try to use that backup to RESTORE, you will only
be able to restore back to that point in time.  You will NOT be able to roll
Informix's logical logs forward to bring you up to the point of failure.
The only way to use Informix's logical logs is to restore from one of their
backups.  At the end of the disk restore, it says, "Do you want
to apply your logical logs?"  There is no way to do that step independently.

(This is in contrast to Oracle, where you can restore the disk using whatever,
and then say "recover database," which is essentially saying "roll my
redolog forward."

So, what do you do?  You can use tbtape to perform your Informix backups to
disk if you have the disk space, then have ADSM back them up.  You can use
tbtape (ontape, sorry.  They changed the name.) to back up to tape outside
of ADSM.  Not fun, but I have done it.  Impossible to automate the swapping
of tapes for a multi-volume backup, though.

Or!  ADSM can port to Informix's new onbar utility which is DESIGNED to
work with products like ADSM.  All it does is give ADSM a data stream, which
ADSM can put anywhere it wants.  I have no idea, however, the status (or
non-status) of ADSM's support for onbar.

Hope this helps...