Today's commonly held view of tape backup is being radically threatened by the emerging requirement for continuous operations. This need is created from the ongoing deployment of mission critical applications on the distributed network.
Downtime is no longer acceptable.
One of the keys to the elimination of downtime is data redundancy. Today's backup processes do not provide the online, direct access redundancy required for continuous operations. This inadequacy is causing a transformation. Backup, as we know it, will be relegated to a tertiary process in mission critical environments. Disk rather than tape or optical is the front end to this new data protection strategy.