Disk and Solid-State Devices

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Backup Appliances

Why not? It has happened with NFS, mail servers, Web servers, Web caching, firewalls, and routers. You can get an appliance for just about anything today. So why wouldn't it work with backup? The model seems to be fitting for this type of solution; some companies are trying to present turnkey backup solutions with industry-leading products, but that is not a true appliance. That is a very nicely integrated package of a tape library, SCSI/fiber bridges, headless server, network connectivity with a software solution-all nicely installed in the 19-inch rack or even in the tape library itself. That looks like an appliance, but it isn't there just yet. Perhaps the intelligent backup server and the appliance server would come together at some point in the future, then tape libraries or large disk subsystems or server arrays would become the appliances of the future for backup.

By definition, an appliance would have to contain some of the intelligence we talked about previously, with much of the self-discovery built in for scalability as well. When you plug in an appliance at home, shouldn't you just have to turn the switch on to get the benefit? Perhaps the backup appliance model will follow this in the future-a self-discovering, self-configuring, self-tuning, highly available decentralized backup database with workload sharing. An additional backup appliance will first configure itself on the network, look for a previously installed appliance, and either place itself subject to this primary server or promote itself to the primary position.

Having highly available backup servers with no dependency on a particular server that holds the 'keys' for recovery would be a future all of us would like to see. However, this is a very new concept. There aren't many people out there working backup into an appliance model, at least not yet.

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