What is the most important aspect of data protection in DR?
Are tape backups a thing of the past when it comes to DR? It is very interesting how quickly things change in our industry — My answer to this question a year ago was highlighting replication or mirroring for highly critical data, disk-to-disk backups for middle tier data and finally, low cost tape backups for the tier 3 backups and archives. The main driver behind this rationale was the cost of tape backup media which was still the cheapest media. At the same time, a newer technology was surfacing and slowly getting backup administrators’ attention: data deduplication for disk-based backups. When we look at the major and rapid advances in the field of deduplication (companies like Data Domain are now on the fourth generation of their product), tape has lost a lot of price advantage. With data reduction ratios averaging 20:1 in some cases, deduplication technology has reduced the cost of backing up to low cost disk by the same order of magnitude — making it that much more competitive
