These two trend lines continue today. In the 1990's, the second wave began, as backup time became an issue. Shrinking backup windows and increasing file system sizes put more pressure on the backup process. The solutions to this problem came in faster performance and unattended processes enabled by sophisticated data management software and tape library automation. During the last 10 years, the emphasis in tape drive development has been capacity and only recently, transfer rate.
Access time refers to the search rate on a piece of mounted media.
But, there is more. The system is a library, not a single drive or a single piece of media. The requirement for network tape systems is no different. The central objective of data protection is to keep network and business applications continuously available. In Figure 3, the relationships between application availability and the two types of data protection systems, data copy and direct access, are illustrated.