Brown says Quantum surveys have shown that a full third of all tape backups never finish. It's those kind of statistics that are driving interest in disk backup. But Quantum has eschewed the pure disk-to-disk, file-to-file approach in favor of its DX-30 dedicated virtual tape appliance. The reason: more seamless integration with current tape backup environments.
Nelson says the experience of the 40 or so beta sites for the DX-30 is that storage managers keep backups on the DX-30 for a month. That window covers the overwhelming majority of restore requests. Then users archive the backups to tape for longer-term storage. Staging backups to disk first lets storage managers use a longer backup window.
Under this scenario, Brown thinks that users may ultimately buy fewer drives - a trend also driven by larger, more consolidated libraries and bigger drive capacities - but will buy more media as disk backup leads to a higher percentage of successful backups.
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This was first published in August 2002