The demand for increasingly higher on-line storage capacity is also being driven by the fact that we work differently than we used to. The formation of temporary workgroups and project teams requires the freedom to collaborate and share information between departments, functions, remote offices and strategic partners. The write transfer rate has remained the key consideration in choosing a backup system and has made tape the mainstay in back-up and offline storage management. However, users should not assume that the restore performance of their backup system will match the backup performance.
Users can be back online in seconds.
DVD-RAM is a random access technology that enables a disc to be loaded and data restoration started in about 15 sec., compared to a DLT tape drive which requires more than 2 minutes to load a tape and search for the data. DVD-R General media also provides a data life of more than 30 years. Both are substantially more reliable than tape. In addition, unlike tape and other magnetic and removable media, DVD discs are not affected by head crashes or stray magnetic fields. The high-density media occupies a much smaller shelf space than tape.