In the data backup, restore and archiving space, virtual tape sub-systems represent one of the fastest growing product sectors.
This is according to Amit Parbhucharan, technology marketing director at Channel Data, who says shipped volumes of virtual tape subsystems from the US reached new highs in the closing months of 2004.
"The virtual tape library sales are booming in SA," he says, underlining the increased backup and restore performance as well as reliability of these disk-based sub-systems.
"From our perspective, the sales of these systems have doubled in the last six months as vendors, such as Quantum, release new hardware offerings that have the backing of a significant percentage of the software industry - which is itself fully supportive of the trend," says Parbhucharan.
"Key drivers include the affordable price of hard disk capacity - predominately ATA - as well as the ease of implementation of disk-based sub-systems which offer features such as redundant and hot-swappable components, together with performance benchmarks of around 2TB per hour which represents a significant increase over tape."
Parbhucharan adds that virtual tape appliances provides users with the capability to build disk-based backup architectures in a way that the primary storage-serving role is not impacted by the backup process.
"The backup process will continue to be fundamental to IT infrastructure and storage management. Using tape devices is a complex and often error-prone set of tasks. This is not to say that tape is destined to disappear but rather that it has a definite, important purpose: that of longer-term, offsite archiving.
"The evolution from a dedicated tape-based backup solution to one that employs tiered disk-based backup and virtualisation will deliver cost savings and ease complexity. This will also increase job satisfaction for personnel responsible for data security," he adds.
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