The question of how to effectively back up data has been plaguing IT departments for years. To date, magnetic tape has been the medium of choice because it is inexpensive and easy to transport offsite for disaster recovery purposes. But tape is also difficult to manage, unreliable, not secure and cumbersome. As disk prices are falling, backup to disk has become a reality. However, many organizations quickly find that without compression and data de-duplication that the amount of disk required to maintain backup retention is cost prohibitive.
Over the past couple years, first generation disk-based backup systems with data de-duplication technology have alleviated some of the challenges associated with backing up to disk, but these systems have their challenges as well. Newer, second-generation systems improve upon disk-based backup with de-duplication and eliminate the challenges of the first generation systems.
This paper will examine the differences between the first and second generation disk-based backup systems, and will focus on the following areas:
- Data de-duplication method
- Backup performance
- Restore performance
- Tape copy performance
- Data integrity
- Second-site system for offsite tape replacement and faster disaster recovery
- Scalability
- Customer support
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