Sam: for archival purposes (which should be distinguished from "backing up" ... tape is still the answer. For backing up purposes, then tape is losing ground big time to disk.
As cost to deliver data to offsite locations drops significantly over next 12-24 months because of things like DWDM, then more and more backup will go to disk. There is also talk that some large users won't use tape at all for backup purposes. At the SNIA show, they did a survey, can't remember the number, but many large endusers said they were already several hundred percent over capacity in tape libraries.
However, archiving will still go to tape. Even though you can back up data a hell of a lot faster to disk, for less money, you just don't fill a vault with disk drives for archival purposes.
As an investor, I wouldn't be betting on long term growth for tape library companies, unless they have some great backup/recovery software.
On the software subject, I really don't want to type a lot, but vendors such as EMC and NetApp have imbedded tools which do it online, and Veritas/Legato/IBM have aftermarket software tools for this. Databases such as Oracle have built-in utilities for this. There are also many applications which can't be backed up realtime. Not all backup packages work with all applications or filesystems either, and all have different restore scenarios and requirements. Backup is easy. Restoring is the tricky part. |
