This is an exciting time for people involved in data protection, and not in the bad way that things can be exciting. Many more options, techniques, and practices have become available to IT professionals. The new technology solves a great many problems. Three major technologies or practices are rapidly changing our ability to protect mission-critical information. First, backup is changing - dramatically. The introduction of disk-to-disk backup systems is shrinking backup windows to nearly zero and bringing restore times in line with modern service levels. With disk-to-disk systems, the traditional tape backup devices are replaced with a hard drive-based system. Using a technique called virtual tape, the disk system emulates the tape system for purposes of software compatibility. Since the disk drives are much faster than tape devices, backup and restore operations are much faster.

As I point out in my book, restore operations that may have taken four or five hours can now be done in 90 minutes or less. This is significant when you consider the requirements of a 0.99999 service level.

The link for this article located at Sys-con is no longer available.