Selection Criteria For Mission-Critical Environments

As enterprises shift their backup and data protection strategy from tape to disk, IT operations professionals can choose from continuous data protection, rotating point-in-time snapshots, and backup to a disk target solutions. Most enterprises want to introduce disk in order to meet backup windows and improve restore capabilities, but they don't want to rip out and replace their existing backup software and tape systems or manage yet another point data protection offering. Instead, enterprises want to optimize their existing environment and the simplest way to do so is to simply introduce a disk target.

Now, the question is which disk target? Should enterprises select a conventional disk target (perhaps use available capacity on an existing storage array) or select a purpose-built disk appliance such as a virtual tape library (VTL). For enterprises that want to use disk and tape in a tiered backup strategy, a VTL is the best option. However, the VTL market is very crowded and there are significant differences in vendor offerings, so enterprises must choose carefully.