Fred Pinkett of ExaGrid Systems talks about a new approach to data backup
Tape-based data backup is insufficient to meet these requirements. Restores from tape are slow and unreliable because it is a mechanical medium. During critical restore operations, tapes are found corrupted, damaged, blank, unlabeled or mislabeled. Tapes are too easily portable and may be lost or stolen. Locating and retrieving data from old, off-site tapes can take hours or days; and when you get them back, old tapes can’t be read by new tape drives or new backup software releases.
For the past five decades, magnetic tape as a backup storage medium has been the only cost-effective solution. However, business demands for faster backups and restores of more data have pushed tape beyond its capabilities causing backups that overrun daytime operations, data loss, a constant cycle of tape format upgrades, and the cost and time involved in managing larger numbers of tapes in rotation.
In response, organizations are implementing new solutions using disk as the backup medium. The backup server copies the data to a disk-based system in the data center. This means that backups are faster, restores can be done reliably and tape management challenges are eliminated. The combination of less expensive disk drives and new data reduction technologies, which we will talk about in a future entry, makes this possible. Organizations can replace onsite and, if required, even offsite tape copies with online disk-based storage to reduce the risk of data loss, speed up data recovery and reduce the cost and time associated with managing tape. Since all data is protected online, these solutions ensure long-term data integrity, availability, and security. This makes disk-based backup one of the main topics of discussion in the data storage industry today.
About the author
Fred Pinkett is vice president of market development at ExaGrid Systems, Inc. in Westboro. Fred brings more than 20 years of technology marketing experience to ExaGrid, where he works as part of the executive team on product strategy, execution, and operations. He also works with ExaGrid's sales organization and business development teams on strategic product and technology relationships. He holds an undergraduate degree in computer science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from Boston College.
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