Backing up to disk instead of tape
From
Computerworld comes an article about disk array manufacturer EMC and their entry into the disk backup market:
bq. EMC Corp. today plans to announce a data-archiving device that offers the speed and file-level granularity of disk storage but looks like a tape library to application servers.
bq. The Clariion Disk Library is based on the company's Clariion disk array line and costs about 50% more than high-end tape libraries with comparable storage capacities, EMC said. List prices for the device, which is being introduced at the Storage Networking World conference, range from $109,000 for a 500GB model to $450,000 for a 32TB configuration.
EMC is very pricey stuff - used some of their products in a previous job and although the engineering is rick solid, we were able to build the same functionality using C.O.T.S. hardware for about 35% of the price.
It is interesting to see the idea of backup moving away from tape and on to disk. Disk space is cheap these days -- high performance storage is less than one dollar/Gigabyte and when you combine multiple disks into a RAID array, the chance of data loss drops to insignificance. You can loose a drive and still be able to recover the lost data.
Posted by DaveH at April 5, 2004 3:26 PM