IT Administrators Should Consider Migrating to Disk-Based Data Protection Technology, According to Revinetix White Paper

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH – June 2007 – Revinetix, a pioneer in Disk2Disk2Disk™ backup solutions, today announced the release of a technology white paper on data storage protection and disaster recovery entitled “Migrating from Tape to Disk Backups.”

Targeting Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) Information Technology (IT) decision makers, the new white paper encourages computer network administrators to move to new disk-based data protection technologies to overcome the deficiencies of legacy tape backup solutions and to effectively address the challenges of deploying a fast, user-friendly, reliable, secure, cost-effective, and scalable backup strategy.

“Recent industry surveys have exposed the truth — most IT managers can’t wait to replace all their tape drives and cartridges within their data centers with hard disk drives,” said Revinetix Vice President of Marketing, Bryce Lee. “The needs of businesses, small and large, have outpaced the capabilities of tape backup technologies in recent years. While tape has been the default data backup-and-restore medium in corporate data centers for over 50 years, today’s increasing data storage needs, shrinking backup windows, declining disk costs, and emergence of Serial ATA technology have combined to push tape out of the spotlight in favor of disk.”

According to the Revinetix report, the adoption of disk-based data protection solutions increased an estimated 50% in 2006, attributed largely to increasing data capacities and disk’s unique ability to meet backup windows that cannot be met with tape. Several advantages of disk versus tape technology also contributed to this trend:

• Faster restores – The random access nature of disk drives enables the instant merging of incremental backups. Contrast this with tape, where multiple incremental backups are often spread across multiple tapes and likely to be far from the start of the tape.
• Shorter backup windows – Random access and higher reliability of disk backup enable more incremental backups to be leveraged per full backup to reduce the backup window. Full backups can be scheduled much less frequently, or selected to coincide with an expected lull in operations (i.e., over the weekend). Further, multiple clients can be backed up simultaneously with disk-based backup which results in potentially higher throughput.
• Economies of incremental backup – Due to the additional time penalties of incremental tape restores and because tape restores frequently fail, many IT departments keep copies of full (Level 0) backups in their tape libraries. There are often many redundant copies of the same file on tape. This significantly increases the cost per Gigabyte of the tape media by wasting capacity on unnecessary duplicated file storage.
• Accelerated backup and archiving – Disk-based solutions leverage RAID performance and reliability to quickly backup and restore data.
• Greater reliability – Research has found that as many as 70% of tape recovery attempts fail. Disk-based solutions benefit from very reliable commodity disks, made even more reliable by using RAID to protect against disk failures. There are no tapes to misplace, or robotics to jam and recalibrate. Disk drives are self-contained and less sensitive to environmental conditions, so they can be reliably used for a longer period of time in more diverse environments.
• Easier management – Disk-based solutions are easier to manage overall. The user interfaces and concepts of file system, disk, and network attached storage (NAS) are familiar even to entry-level IT staff, meaning less training and fewer mistakes from the start.

The full Revinetix white paper is available for free download at:
http://www.revinetix.com/press_room/White_papers/tape_migration.pdf

About Revinetix, Inc.
Revinetix provides innovative data protection solutions that ensure continuity of business, control of critical information and confidence in recovery systems. Revinetix offers the first total disk backup and recovery solution that allows automated backup schedules for every user on the network and allows critical data to be stored safely off-site from a single appliance. For more information, customers are encouraged to contact Revinetix at 801-263-5116 or sales@revinetix.com to locate a reseller in their local area.

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