Ever since IT system administrators began backing up their data, tape storage has been their medium of choice. Over the years, advances in tape storage technology have brought to the market a decent balance between price, performance and reliability. Still, tape has never been the perfect backup solution. In the modern environment where SLAs are often measured in minutes, rather than hours or days, IT managers are constantly on the lookout for systems that can rapidly recover their data with a minimum amount of downtime. Recently, inexpensive and reliable ATA disk technology has moved to the forefront to address this need. With disk technology now a viable and appealing option, the next challenge becomes how to best harness the potential of disk as a data recovery medium.

This white paper provides:

• A discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of using disk as a target for data recovery operations, relative to tape
• A comparison between traditional disk-to-disk (D2D) and tape emulation architectures